Attributions:
This project designed and run by ITU iGEM Team members. The idea of the project and its development may simply have described as “a story of science and struggle” that lasted for almost 2 years, and now it’s time to give credits for all its contributors.
The Team
Galip Can Güçlü:Team leader, jungler, pusher, aviator, navigator and involved every part of the project.
Altuğ Uludağ: Vice-team leader, wet-lab commander, the man mainly behind the wet-lab experiments, but also involved in every aspect of the project.
Nedim Hacıosmanoğlu: Vice-team leader, dry-lab commander, the man mainly behind the dry-lab experiments, but also involved in every aspect of the project.
Evrim Fer:MD simulations team member, operated our MD simulations and their analyses
Dilşad Dağtekin:PR girl, ruled our network, collaborations and digital media.
Perihan Yağmur Güneri: Wet-lab team member, helped us for the different parts of our experiments
Melis Akgün: Wet-lab team member, helped us for the different parts of our wet-lab experiments
Istanbul Technical University – Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics
Dr. Bülent Balta: Assistant professor at Istanbul Technical University-Department of Molecular Biology and
Genetics, assisted us in primary investigations on methamphetamine sensor domain and introduced us the field of Molecular Dynamics
Dr. Fatma Neşe Kök: Associate professor at Istanbul Technical University-Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, assisted as the primary PI of this project, helped us to overcome all the bureaucracy work. Without her trust to us, this project would never have an end.
Dr. Nevin Gül Karagüler: Associate professor at Istanbul Technical University-Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Vice-dean of Istanbul Technical University-Faculty of Science and Literature, assisted us as the secondary PI of the project.
Dr. Sefer Baday: Assistant professor at Istanbul Technical University-Institute of Informatics, assisted us for the design and operation of MD simulations, shared necessary codes with us that are necessary for an easy MD simulation.
Dr. Alper Tunga Akarsubaşı: Associate professor, assisted us by sharing his lab equipments including the agarose gel casting system that we used in all of our cloning experiments.
Sponsorship/Financial Support
We would like to thank Governor of Istanbul, VasipŞahin, and Dr. Burhan Metin for their moral and financial support that they provided us. These two person gave us hope about our future and promoted our willing to serve our country with science.
We also would like to thank Prof. Dr. ErtuğrulKaraçuha for his assistance on providing us simulation time sponsorship from the UHeM Supercomputer at Istanbul Technical University, and we are grateful to Dr. KadirDiri for introducing supercomputers to us.
Literature:
In this project, sensor parts for our biosensor derived from 2 main work;
Firstly, binding of methamphetamine to the alpha synuclein protein reported by the Dr. Omid Tavassoly and Dr. Jeremy S. Lee in their study titled as “Methamphetamine binds to alpha synuclein and causes conformational change”. Secondly, anti-METH antibody that we use as the base of our second plan of the project developed by Peterson et al. and reports about design and affinity improvement of that single chain antibody reported in different journals. We use the idea that single chain antibodies can be used for FRET (Fluorescence resonance energy transfer) studies and tried to apply this method for the methamphetamine detection. We are grateful for the contributors of these two projects for providing such a chance for the synthetic biology developers by their research.
Artists/Designers:
Our lovely Meth Busters cartoon drawn by a talented artist from Calluna Design Studio, also a molecular biologist,FundaBüyükbaş, and our team logo designed and drawn by SerdarErbay. We are very grateful for these two artists for their work and the design that they add to our project.
Last but not least, we are very thankful to the web designer and our “çavo” Musa KorayAkpınar for his work to build our website.
