People page
TEAM:
Our team was founded in the middle of 2015 and it is made up of 10 students of the Biomedical Engineering degree of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra who are really fond of science. As the interests of each member of our group vary from Engineering to Biology and Medicine, we form a highly interdisciplinary team capable of facing all the challenges of this project. We have acquired all the technologic and biologic knowledge and tools necessary with the practices developed during the degree and in the internships that each of us has done in important institutions such as: the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) of the UPF, the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) or the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL).
We are not only fond of science but also willing to help society. We strongly believe we can really make a change. Our attitude and permanent insistence were the key elements which made our university teachers allow us to start this project.
Advisors
We also have two advisors, Carlos Toscano and Salva Duran, who have kindly supervised and helped us all along the project and to whom we are sincerely grateful.
External Advisors
We are very thankful with the help via email from all the people that we bothered and decided to give us their opinion about our project. Dr. Eugene W. Gerner gave us at the beginnings of our project greate advice about how we could focus our ideas. He is a Chief Scientific Officer, Board Member, Co-Founder at Cancer Prevention Pharmaceuticals and one of the biggest help we had to better understand the world of polyamines. We would also like to say thank Dr. Masao Kawakita, from the Stem Cell Project, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Scienceo, who gave us great advice about polyamine-like molecules. Finally, we would like to thank Dr. David Christianson and Dr. Nicolas Porter from the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Chemistry for sending us a plasmid with polyamine deacetylase.
Collaborations
iGEM UPO Sevilla Collaboration
From our modelling and computational work came the wonderful opportunity to colaborate with another iGem team, UPOSevilla. Both teams were working on metabolic analysis, and had developed a tool to facilitate analysis of complex enzymatic pathways. However, our two aproaches were quite diferent. Sevilla’s team focused on velocity and straight-forwardness with a C script that took the input as text files and displayed the output as another text file, a log of the different concentrations of the different compounds over time. Visualitzation or post-processing of the data was left to the user, which made the program more modular, albeit less user friendly. Our approach, Polyenzime, was a bit widder in scope, incorporating inhibition reactions and source/sink nodes, and consisted on a GUI where the user could intuitively create and run the pathways, obtaining the evolution of the system in handy graphics without further ado.
Comparing the two prespectives on the same problem gave us the opportunity to further develop our approach, strengthing its downsides (implementation of a runge-kuta algorithm to make the integration more robust), and reinforcing the advantages (improving the user experience in a variety of ways). We could also interchange valuable feedback that lead to some bug-fixes and improvements. This would not have been possible without intensive comunication between the teams, and we thank the collegues at Sevilla for the patience and support trough our programming endavours.
With the wide array of topics iGEM comprises, finding another team with a common front to collaborate with may be difficult. We were lucky to have that opportunity, and we belive that the project has improved and gained context as a consequence.
In the image we can see a model of UPO-Sevilla’s team represented in our software.
iGEM Paris Bettencourt
As iGEM competition promotes collaboration, we are helping this team by providing them products related to our vineyards, so that they can find microorganisms that can naturally digest wine and try to enhance their ability so as to make a potent, biological wine stain removing device. We wish them a lot of luck!
Sponsors
Our team also received help from many institutions. It is because of them that we could live this adventure and we could not be more thankful to them. These are all our sponsors:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) Clínica Decorps de Cirugía Plástica y Medicina Estética Tecnisa Campos S.A GATC Biotech DANAGEN-BIOTED S.L.
And all the people who collaborated with our crowdfunding campaign!
Thank you all!
ATTRIBUTIONS
Project support and advice
Dr. Salva Durán Nebreda, Postdoctoral fellow in the Complex Systems Lab
Carlos Toscano Ochoa, PhD student of Systems Biology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Dr. Jordi García Ojalvo, PI of Dynamical Systems Biology lab and professor of System’s Biology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Dr. Óscar Cámara Rey Associate Professor at the Information and Communication Technologies Department (DTIC) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Dr. Ernest Montbrió Fairen Computational Neuroscience group, Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Dr. Jérôme Noailly, Principal Investigator of the Multiscale and Computational Biomechanics and Mechanobiology (MBIOMM) group - SIMBioSys Research group - Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Fundraising and media dissemination advice
Dr. Regina López Aumatell, Research Manager at Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Lab support
Dr. Salva Durán-Nebreda
Carlos Toscano Ochoa
Modelling support
Dr. Óscar Camara
Dr. Ernest Montbrió Fairen
Dr. Jérôme Noailly
Logo design and crowdfunding video support
Aaron Joaquim Castellví Santiago, Audiovisual Communication Degree at Universitat de Barcelona
Iker Fuentes Santiago, High School Student at Colegi Mare de Deu del Carme de Tarragona
Thanks and acknowledgements
We are very thankful with the help via email from all the people that we bothered and decided to give us their opinion about our project. Dr. Eugene W. Gerner gave us at the beginnings of our project great advice about how we could focus our ideas. He is a Chief Scientific Officer, Board Member, Co-Founder at Cancer Prevention Pharmaceuticals and one of the biggest help we had to better understand the world of polyamines. We would also like to say thank Dr. Masao Kawakita, from the Stem Cell Project, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Scienceo, who gave us great advice about polyamine-like molecules. Finally, we would like to thank Dr. David Christianson and Dr. Nicolas Porter from the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Chemistry for sending us a plasmid with polyamine deacetylase.
