Attributions

Human Practices

Our team organized and participated to many events in order to promote the synthetic biology and our project. Here is listed all the events and the team members who participated to them. We also met stakeholders in order to learn more about CRISPR-Cas9.

Meeting Stakeholders

Mrs Genevieve Fioraso : French deputy, former ministry of Higher Education and research. She wrote a report on synthetic biology for the French Parliament.
Mrs Catherine Procaccia: French Senator. She is working on a report for the French Parliament on economical and environnemental issues of new biotechnologies, especially CRISPR-Cas9.
Dr Agnès Ricroch: Professor at AgroParisTech school working on plants and their regulations.
Pr Marc Fellous: Emeritus Professor at Paris Diderot University and Medical Doctor
Mr Eric Enderlin: French and European Patent Attorney at Novagraaf.

CRISPR Cas-9 Conference

We organized a conference in Paris-Sud University about the societal issues of CRISPR-Cas9. Claire, Marin and Laetitia contacted the lecturers. Caroline introduced the CRISPR-Cas9 technology and its origins. Laetitia introduced the iGEM competition and the Paris Saclay's team. The lecturers were Pierre Walrafen, an European Patent Attorney, and Jean Denis Faure, a researcher and professor at AgroParisTech school.

Exhibition at Nanterre University

With the help of Stella Pacheco from the CROUS of Versailles, the TEAM held an exhibition at Nanterre University called "This is not a Lemon". Our goal was to raise awareness about Synthetic Biology, collect opinions about it and talk about the iGEM competition with a non scientific audience. Some of us, Caroline, Marion, Alice and Claire were present at the site to meet people and answer their questions. Great learning moment!

Festival Vivant 2016

We had the opportunity to promote our project and the iGEM competition during 3 days at the Festival Vivant 2016, held at the Paris Diderot University. Marin, Naiane, Coline, Caroline, Maxence, Carla, Laetitia and Mathilde took turns presenting the project to a broad audience with the help of posters and some cool ludic tools.

Fête de la science

The "Fête de la science" is a national event organized by several universities, such as Paris-Saclay university. The aim is to promote science in general and it was another opportunity to talk about our project to a non scientific public. We received mostly families and we explained the synthetic biology to children with ludic tools. Caroline, Naiane, Yacine and Carla were there to represent the iGEM Paris-Saclay team 2016.

Meet-up Ile de France

The Meet-up Ile de France was co-organized with iGEM team Paris Pasteur. It took place on the 6th of August in Pasteur Paris Institute. It was a meeting of several iGEM teams of Paris Region: Paris Bettencourt, Evry, Ionis Paris, Pasteur Paris, and ourselves, Paris Saclay.

Naiane was the one who took care of the organization and communication along with Pasteur Paris teams members. Coline and Léa presented the project during a 20 minutes presentation. A great way to spend a summer day under the parisian sun. A moment which allowed great interaction with other parisian teams and their projects, specially during the "ice breakers" picnics.

Vox Pop

Marin and Carla went with their camera to the Luxembourg's garden in Paris to interview parisians and know more their opinion about synthetic biology. A very unique and sometimes funny experience to get in touch with the public this way. A great way to spend a sunny saturday in a very parisian style: in the gardens. Marin was in charge of editing the video.

Communication

Naiane was in charge of the social networks such Facebook and Instagram. Marin was in charge of Twitter. Naiane was as well in charge of the photography. She also contacted the Paris-Saclay Media in order to promote the iGEM Competition and our team's project inside the Paris Saclay Complex.

Carla designed the team's logo and the marketing strategy with the romantic thematic "Get DNA Closer".

Project and Biobrick design

In order to build our project we had to do a lot of bibliographic work and meet researchers who helped us to develop the project.

Dr. Olivier Espéli, a reseacher and an expert in Genome Dynamics studies at the Collège-de-France, accepted to receive Victor, Manhaz, Marion and Philippe. The main purpose of this meeting was several to exchange informations concerning the guideline of the project, more precisely: to discuss about a reporter system (visualisation tool) and which area we should target (for instance: ter site or replichores right).

Dr. David Bikard, a reseacher at the Institut Pasteur in Paris and an expert on CRISPR/Cas9, received Victor, Caroline and Léa. He helped our team by choosing which orthologous dCas9s to use in our project, in order to maintain the sgRNA/dCas9 recognition specificity.

Our project was split in two parts: Visualisation and Linking Two DNA Strands. For the visualization part, Caroline, Charlène and Léa made all the bibliographic research and designed the biobricks. Maxence, Victor, Coline and Manhaz were in charge of the linking tool part of the project.

Financial support

Yacine and Carla were in charge of contacting different companies which could potentially support the Paris Saclay's project and the trip to Boston. Alice, Marion and Fabio met a scientist from Mondelez Company who asked a presentation of our project "Get DNA closer". Claire was the mediator who got us the financial support from the Office for Science & Technology at the Embassy of France in the United States. Also, as a financial strategy our team also got involved into a crowdfunding campaign. To explain our project to a wider public, we made a video which was released together with the campaign. Carla did the drawings shown on the video and the voice-over. The video equipment was provided by Martin and filmed by him.

Laboratory

Without our sharp lab team, our project would have never seen the light of the day. The teammates working during the months of June, July and August were: Laetitia, Naiane, Mathilde, Caroline, Marion, Léa, Charlène, Terrence and Alice. During the months of September and October Maxence and Mahnaz continued the experiments and they were the ones who assembled the final biobricks. Furthermore, the instructors (Claire, Marie and Olivier) and the PIs (Philippe and Sylvie) have guided the team during all the lab work.

During the lab work, we've met several people who willingly helped us:

• Emmanuel Dassa for providing the lab itself
• Isabelle Hatin and Olivier Bugaud for the cytometry
• Dr Annick Jack for the Western-Blot
• Sylvain Pendino and Myriam Swist for helping us with the medium preparations and sterilizations
• Chantal Bohn for help us with the many sequencings

Model

This part of the project was almost entirely done by Marion, our bioinformatician. During the summer she worked hard to build our models. Fabrice Leclerc, Claire Toffano-Nioche, Emily Drouineau and Matthieu Sarazin helped a lot and gave very important feedback for this aspect of the project.

Wiki Design

The Design of our Wiki was done by Gaetan and Carla with the help of Maxime Schaffhauser, a web writer student and it has been programmed by Fabio. Furthermore, Marion and Terrence, who have the best skills in IT, gave a strong support on the Wiki design development. The Wiki construction was supervised by Maxence.

To sum up

To sum up the attributions part, we've set up a table to show what each team member did, with all the informations previously presented.