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Our team this year could not have achieved what we have without the help and support of the fantastic people around us. We would like to thank everybody for their patience and assistance with our project this year no matter how influential their contribution.
Professor John Love: Associate Professor in Plant & Industrial Biotechnology and our lead iGEM coordinator. He provided us with some much needed advice throughout the project both within the lab and on many aspects of our Human Practices.
Dr Paul James: Research Fellow and our first point of call for anything iGEM related. From helping us in the initial planning of our project to aiding us with our module design, lab techniques and modelling, Dr James has been incredibly influential in all aspects of our project.
Dr Chloe Singleton: Research Fellow and main point of call within the lab. Dr Singleton was their to assist us on any and all lab techniques and protocols. She also provided further advice on various science outreach projects and other queries we had during the summer.
Jamie Gilman: PhD student and main supervisor for the first few weeks of the summer. We would like to thank Jamie for his patience with us in the lab and taking time out of his own research to help us understand and carry out the protocols as well as running the FACS for us in the Interlab study.
Ryan Edginton: PhD student and point of call for anything physics or modelling related. Ryan was particularly helpful for advice on biological modelling and with his experience of iGEM, he helped us with time management and wiki construction. Ryan was also instrumental in helping conduct the Newcastle collaboration and the intensity measurements of our apparatus.
Dagmara Kolak: Laboratory Manager. We would like to thank Dagmara for her guidance on good lab practice to ensure our experiments were designed and carried out in a safe way.
Dr Anya Nenniger: Research fellow. Anja was particularly helpful with primer design, guidance on genome integration and ensuring the lab work was done in an efficient manner.
Everyone else in the Mezzanine lab: Thank you very much for letting us take over your lab for the summer, we hope we didn’t cause you all too much stress!
We would also like to thank IDT for their support providing us with the free g-blocks of the parts we used in the lab work. Without the quick arrival of the DNA, we would have been unable to complete our lab work efficiently.
There were various people who helped us and gave us advice on creating a synthetic biology module for second years. Thank you to Dr Mark Ramsdale, Dr Caitlin Kight and Dr Nicky King for advice in the initial planning stages of the module and further to Dr Paul James and Professor John Love for championing our module at later stages to ensure we have the best possible chance of getting it implemented. A special thanks to all the lecturers we met and frightened by proposing they become module coordinator for the module!
As the board game was the longest running project, there are many people we need to thank. First of all to Ms Hayley Andrews and those at The Judd School who allowed us to test the first prototype of our board game, and later for her advice about getting it distributed to schools across the UK. We also want to thank all those who helped us design and make the initial and later prototypes of the board game and to Damien Riddle of Edexcel, who gave us backing to create a Stretch and Challenge tool for students and teachers. Dr Mark Ramsdale deserves a big thank you as he provided us with the funds necessary to print off board games and cards for widening participation activities. Dr Alice Mills was essential, both in the early stages and the late in helping us find schools to test our board game in. Dr Caitlin Kight also provided some good advice on how best to distribute the board game and ways we could make it more accessible. On the same note, we would like to thank all those who came up with brilliant ideas on improving our board game design and implementation, like Dr Sara Burton. We are especially grateful of Colyton Grammar School for agreeing to have us for a less and testing the latest version of BioMech as well as Tyrone Middle School in Florida and Bishop Wand C of E sixth form.
We would like to thank all the people - academics, researchers and public figures - who were interviewed or recorded Desert Island Science podcasts with us; we wouldn’t have had a public engagement human practices without you. Dr Caitlin Kight, Ben May, Duncan Sandes, Grace Williams have all been influential at one point in improving our interaction with the public and students, especially Ben May in helping set up a separate web page for our project, specifically looking at the equality and diversity work. This allowed our message and work to be shared by the university and various social media accounts. Dr Sara Burton has also given us very useful advice on how to engage more with the public. We would like to thank Dr Nicky King for allowing us to attend the two science fairs. We would also like to thank the three work experience students who helped develop our project, both in Human Practices and in the Lab.
We are very grateful that Dr Andrew Griffiths, Dr Eduarda Santos, Dr Ceri Lewis, Dr Sharon Dixon, Dr Rob Wilson and Professor Michelle Ryan could take time for us to interview them on equality and diversity. Without these interviews and experiences shared, we wouldn’t have had most of our equality and diversity work and we wouldn’t have been able to develop our own views on equality and diversity. The Athena Swan Group and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity group at the university gave us the statistics necessary to back up the accounts given by the academics we interviewed. We would like to thank all those involved in helping us, especially those at XTV and Xpression FM for helping to host the equality and diversity in science panel discussion (Particularly James Woolcock and James Cunningham). Furthermore we would like to thank the panel: Dr Rob Wilson, Dr Alison Hill, Alec James and Laura Howard, for helping us inform the public on the issues of equality and diversity and provided well grounded opinion and understanding.
We are very grateful of the insight and feedback from Marcus Geshater, Dr Tom Ellis and Professor Richard Titball, allowing us to change and adapt our lab work according to its potential use in academic research or industry. We also wish to thank Prof. Robert Beardmore for his advice early on in the process about the prospect of kill switches being mutated against within a relatively short time-frame. Without his help, we would not have looked into using the ministat to create a continuous culture, testing the mutation rate of kill switches.
Every student has had a big role in the project this year; all members of the team have made an appearance in the lab to help with the interlab or main lab project. Daniel Barber, Eloise Lloyd, Jack Fleet and Pablo Sharrock were most present in the lab, assisted by Emily Reeves and Joel Burton-Lowe were also commonly present in the lab this summer. In large part, the genome integration, cloning and characterisation analysis were performed by Dan Barber, Eloise Lloyd and Jack Fleet, as well as specifically the ministat was championed by Dan Barber.
Multiple members of the team were initially involved in research and facts finding for the modelling - Daniel Barber, Jack Fleet, Pablo Sharrock. However, the actual modelling work itself was mostly carried out by Joel Burton-Lowe, Andy Wild and help from Leanne Stanfield and Alan Williams.
We have collaborated with many teams and would like to thank them all for helping us, and we hope we helped them too. Alan Williams and Daniel Barber performed the Newcastle collaboration; Andy Wild performed the Edinburgh collaboration; Leanne Stanfield and Emily Reeves were most involved with the Purdue Collaboration; Alice Redgate and Pablo Sharrock performed the Stanford-Brown collaboration and despite the fact that we were unable to test with the Z1 strain from Glasgow, we would like to thank them very much for helping test the leakiness of our T7 promoter.
The wiki was designed and created by Alan Williams and Andy Wild, with help from Joel Burton-Lowe. Content for the wiki and wiki editing has been done by all members of the team, specific examples are: Daniel Barber writing much of the lab work and Jack Fleet writing and editing much of the Human Practices section, including all the equality and diversity content, with help from Emily Reeves and Andy Wild with the education sections. Joel Burton-Lowe has been the chief designer of the team - creating the posters, logo and other outreach materials.
In terms of public engagement and outreach Alice Redgate has been the most valuable member of the team: filming every vlog, every science fair/school visit, interviewing Professor Dawkins and recording and preparing all of the Desert Island Sciences. Various team members were responsible for communications with the academics, researchers and public figures for Desert Island Science, specifically Hannah Osborne, who arranged a meeting with Jim Al-Khalili. All members of the team have been involved in the scientific outreach at one stage, with Andy Wild, Eloise Lloyd, Joel Burton-Lowe, Alice Redgate and Pablo Sharrock having important roles in designing the board game. Presentations at the different schools were done by Jack Fleet, plus Jack Fleet and Eloise Lloyd prepared and performed the presentation at the Westminster meet-up. Leanne Stanfield was influential in the early stages of the module work, but this role was later taken up by Emily Reeves, who also presented the final product to the head of biosciences at the University of Exeter.
Jack Fleet and Alice Redgate are responsible for the equality and diversity work, interviewing academics and students about gender inequality and the activities of the university in this area. Jack Fleet hosted the panel discussion on diversity in science with a specific focus on gender inequality and Alice Redgate assisted with liaising with XTV and Xpression FM. Joel Burton-Lowe and Leanne Stanfield were very helpful in transcribing some of the interviews for recording on the wiki.
We would like to thank everyone that has helped us this year, we really could not have done it without you all!
