Attributions

Project Design

The BeeT project consists of multiple parts and every student has their own part, but in the end they all come together to form a unified BeeT! All of the modelling projects were based on wet lab projects. Our project has three main categories, sensing the Varroa destructor, toxin production, and safety.

Wet lab

Lisa searched for the Bt toxin inside the Varroa, Linea made a randomized library of the toxin and Jaccoline made vesicles. Carina made the Varroa sensing system based on sensing mite poop and Vitamine B12. Thomas made a quorum sensing system and a subpopulation system, based on a toxin/anti-toxin sytem. Belwina used Cas9 to improve a biocontainment killswitch. Marijn made the light kill switch in the lab, and Tianhe took care of making a toggle switch and combining the light kill switch and sensing system together.

Modelling

Mario modelled the light kill switch which Marijn was making in the lab. Remco modelled the interaction between the Varroa and Bees and the spread of toxin through the hive. Angelina modelled the quorum sensing subpopulation system and Ronald worked on the metabolic modelling and made a pipeline to identify potential cry toxins from raw genome data.

Safety

As for the safety we want to implement a light kill switch in our end product. Also the Cas9 should prevent the bacteria from spreading through the environment.

Human Practice

Carina is our Captain Human Practice, Carina has a Human Practice team with, Linea and Belwina, who help her with the Human Practice. As one of the first things that have been done for the Human practices is getting in contact with Beekeepers. Together with them we tried to think of a solution for the dying bees. We have a collaboration with Synenergene where an application scenario was generated. A movie about synthetic biology has been made for the RIVM. Wiki Construction Lisa is the Wiki Captain, together with Ronald, Remco and Tianhe the design of the wiki was made. With help from Rik van Rosmalen (previous iGEM participant) we were able to make some of the more advanced features of the wiki. Lisa made all the illustrations herself and together with the guys did most of the programming work.

Finances

Angelina is our Treasurer and she, together with Jaccoline for the crowdfunding and Mario for the plane tickets and accommodation, they managed the finances and searched for sponsors.

Other Team Roles

With Thomas as our Team Captain the whole team functioned well. Off course he had much help from his secretary Belwina. Linea was 'Captain Facebook', nothing is more important these days than presenting yourself at social media. Marijn our lab safety manager took care of keeping the lab safe and clean.

Supervisors

Christian Fleck, John van der Oost, Robert Smith, Kees van der Ark, Maarten Reijnders, Stamatios Damalas, Martha Viar Vazquez, Emma Keizer, Alex Kruis, Franklin Nobrega de Luzia.
Advisors
Bob Mulder