Team:Kingsborough NY/Attributions
The 2016 Kingsborough team consisted of several students and faculty mentors. The work was truly done as a team, with a core of students having a helping hand in almost all aspects of the project, and gaining experience with a number of laboratory techniques.
The Kingsborough Core (Students)
The core of the team (in rough order of contributions) was comprised of Alex Dean, Jessica Zhao, Wendy Zhao, Jonathan Nedd, Julian Zhao.
This core team performed all different laboratory tasks: restriction digests, ligations, transformations, PCR reactions, ran gels, and prepared media. Jessica (along with Wendy) helped to keep things organized and employed a color-coded tube labelling scheme for most experiments. Brainstorming sessions and discussions between this core helped to develop the project idea, plan experiments, and troubleshoot problems.
In addition to lab activities, Julian Zhao and Alex Dean also wrote the abstract for the Kingsborough team and completed the safety form, and worked on the format of the Wiki. They both contributed to writing / designing the poster.
Jessica, Wendy, and Jonathan Nedd explored the context of the project's implementation by visiting a local wastewater treatment plant.
Helping Hands
Jonathan Pinkhasov helped in some of the early laboratory work, as well as provided input in the process for producing a poster. Anjelica Buchanan also contributed to some of the preliminary laboratory work.
In addition to some of the above, several students also helped with the initial design of the DNA sequences for the three new genes we hoped to introduce into E. coli; these students were Jeren You, Luana Johnston, Sandra Hardin, and Haitham Alnagar.
Faculty Mentors
Professors Devin Camenares, Grace Axler-Diperte, and Sarwar Jahangir all helped supervise the team's efforts in the laboratory. They all provided guidance regarding various protocols, as well as advice on how to troubleshoot experiments and organize notes.
In addition to the above, Prof. Camenares wrote the code for a short program that was used to optimize the DNA sequences.
College Suport
The Department of Biological Sciences has supported the iGEM since its inception, providing the lab space and access to common equipment which was useful in completing some of the experiments.
A special thanks to the Office of the President of Kingsborough College, who awarded a Faculty Innovation Award to Professor Camenares for the express purpose of aiding the development of the iGEM team. These funds were instrumental for registration of the team.
The Office of College Advancement worked with Professor Camenares to try and secure additional funding sources for the team, as well as promote the team through the college.
The Office of Student Life also worked with Professor Camenares and the iGEM students that doubled as Biotech club officers (in particular club president Jason Meyers) in trying to secure funding specifically for travel to Boston and Jamboree registration.
Vendors, Suppliers, and other Partners
A special thanks to Integrated DNA Technologies, which provided free of charge all the DNA synthesis we used in the project; this includes all three anammox genes used, spacer/accessory DNA for Gibson assembly, and various primers for PCR and sequencing.
NEB provided a discount on some useful enzymes for the project, and BioBasic also provided a discount on some lab supplies, kits and enzymes.
