Team:EPFL/Attributions
Espress'EAU - Attributions
Team organization and timeline
EPFL participated for more than ten years in the iGEM competition. However, usually students don’t participate more than once. This year, all eight of us participated for the first time.
The team was formed by professor Maerkl who sent an e-mail to all EPFL students in December 2019. In February we had our first in-person meetings. The beginning of iGEM for us were three introductory lectures on synthetic biology given by professor Maerkl. After this we transitioned into brainstorming where we were assisted by professor Maerkl himself and the teaching assistants (Shiyu Cheng, Amir Shahein, Laura Grasemann, Chun-Jie (Josh) Cai, Konstantinos Ragios).
In mid March our campus was shut-down and we had our brainstorming sessions on zoom. At this point the outcome of the whole mission was very unclear and our team shrunk from 11 to 8 students.
By May the brainstorming was more or less finished. We proceeded to do research and interviews for Human Practices and planned the lab work. Due to the pandemic our exam session was moved from June to August and we were not given access to the lab until mid-September. Since PhD students were allowed on campus earlier, Shiyu Cheng could run the first plate reader experiments already in August. In September he trained the sub team that were doing wet lab work and also stayed available for troubleshooting.
The Swiss Meetup took place in early September. The three swiss teams, University of Lausanne, University of Zurich and EPFL (us), met in Lausanne. We had a presentation and were glad to receive feedback from team members from former EPFL teams (2019: Laura Kvedarauskaite, Théo Nass, Luc Gabel; 2018: Moustafa Houmani) that were invited as well.
Funding
The project is mainly funded by EPFL through the MAKE initiative and the School of Life Sciences. We would also like to thank our numerous sponsors that enabled us to realize a great project!
Students (A-Z)
Andrei Furtuna
Analyzed the data from the plate reader experiments and from our survey. He did substantial research on the human practices aspect of the project. Together with Sven he coded the wiki. Together with Ella, he was responsible for the social media accounts of the team and, in collaboration with team UNIL, organized and attended the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
Harshdeep
Designed and implemented the temperature sensor and control system as well as the magnetic stirrer. During the project he acquired knowledge about 3D printing and designed and printed several versions of the 3D prototype. Worked on the sensor experiments to get the necessary results out with Julien. He documented his work on GitHub.
Laura Iacobucci
Helped Ella with the capsule design and performed plate reader experiments with the knock-out and the reporter strains. She also designed the team hoodies and T-shirts. She attended the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
Yasmine Kouba
Worked on the cloning of the integration cassettes and performed yeast transformation for the reporter strains. She attended the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
Ella Miray Rajaonson
Worked on the reusable capsule design and did extensive research in human practices. She organized and edited the interview with Quentin Morezzi. She was also responsible for most of the description page visuals. Together with Andrei she was responsible for the social media accounts of the team and, in collaboration with team UNIL, organized and attended the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
Julien Salomon
Designed and implemented the optical density and fluorescence sensors. He also edited the project promotion as well as the presentation video. During the project he acquired knowledge about 3D printing and proceeded to produce several versions of the prototype. He contacted and interviewed Dr. Khajerhnouri during the project finding phase.
Anas Seddiki
Was trained for the cloning of the integration cassettes and worked on the plate reader experiments. He also designed the team logo and created several illustrations for the reporter strains page. He attended the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
Sven Basil Spörri
Worked on the cloning of the integration cassettes and performed yeast transformation. Supervised by Ming he generated the microscopy data. Along with Julien and Harsh he designed and performed the experiments for the characterization of the hardware. Together with Andrei he coded the wiki and filmed the footage for the project promotion as well as the presentation video. He attended the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
Supervisor and teaching assistants
We were very lucky to have an experienced group of supervisors that helped us stay motivated throughout this difficult year!
Sebastian Maerkl
is head of the Laboratory for Biological Network Characterization (LBNC http://lbnc.epfl.ch/) which belongs to the school of engineering (STI) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). He is an experienced iGEM PI and recruited the team. He organized weekly zoom-meetings and guided us through the whole project.
Shiyu Cheng
is a PhD student at LBNC. He organized the wetlab-trainings and supported us in experimental design. He attended weekly meetings and also provided us with reagents when our orders were not there yet. He performed plate reader experiments in August when the team members were not allowed to be on campus. He also provided us with the parts from the Dueber YTK. The part containing the yeast-optimized coding sequence of mScarlet-I was designed and provided by him. He performed the cassette digestions and part plasmid construction.
Laura Grasemann
is a PhD student at LBNC. She attended weekly meetings, shared her opinions on the biological aspect of the project and helped proofreading the wiki.
Amir Shahein
is a PhD student at LBNC. He attended weekly meetings and answered questions about hardware design. He ordered the components for the hardware team and helped them with the implementation
Chun-Jie (Josh) Cai
was a PhD student at LBNC. He attended weekly meetings and shared his opinions on the biological aspect of the project.
Konstantinos Ragios
was a team member of the EPFL iGEM team 2019 and supported us throughout the project with his advice on virtually any aspect of the iGEM competition. He regularly attended weekly meetings and was also present at the Swiss Meetup in Lausanne.
General Support
Martine Truan
is the secretary of LBNC, she kept track of the team’s budget and helped us order equipement.
DLL
Our team had the opportunity to work in the Discovery, Learning Laboratory (DLL) at EPFL. We had access to the basic materials, buffers and measurement equipment such as a fluorescence plate reader, thermocycler, incubator and more.
Andreas Kuster
We had an initial interview with Andreas Kuster from the ETH 2019 iGEM team who worked on the hardware for the Personalised phage therapy project. He gave us the initial inspiration as to how to go about the hardware and the printing of 3D components (which material should be used etc). His GitHub can be found here.
Josiane Smith-Clerc
is the administrator of the DLL Laboratory, she purchased and ordered stock solutions and basic laboratory equipment including pipette tips, gloves, buffers and others. She also trained us on how to work safely in a biosafety level 1 lab.
Ming Yip
is a PhD student in LBNC. The microscopy data was generated with his help.
Luc Patiny
is a lecturer from the Chemistry department at EPFL and a member of Hackuarium. He gave us valuable advice about our hardware detectors and lent us one of his DIY open-source spectrophotometers.
Rachel Aronoff and the Hackuarium
is the president of Hackuarium association in Ecublens, an open public lab. She helped us with our experiments when we were unable to access our school's lab and invited us to the Hackuarium open nights where we have the occasion to pitch our project and receive feedback from various members.
Bernhard Spörri
lent the camera equipment (camera + microphone + tripods) for the project promotion video and the project presentation video free of charge.
Human Practices
Quentin Morezzi
is the president of the association des fontainiers de Suisse Romande (AFSR) provided us with a close feedback for our project and allowed us to know more about his job and its associated problems. He accepted to be interviewed for our Integrated Human Practices part and has agreed to test our prototype if complete.
Prof. Urs von Gunten
is affiliated with the Department for Water Resources and Drinking Water at EAWAG and head of the Laboratory for Water Quality and Treatment (LTQE) at EPFL. We had a Zoom call with him in June where we presented our idea. He gave us feedback which we used to reshape our project.
Dr. Fereidoun Khajerhnouri
is the Head of Water Quality control in the Water Services of Lausanne. Dr. Fereidoun Khajerhnouri is the first person that we contacted in the context of our project, at a time where as a group, we needed to define the scope and the goal of our project. As the main authority in the Lausanne region, Dr. Khajerhnouri was able to give us a broad description of the current infrastructures and systems in place in Switzerland (and in Lausanne more specifically) and thus lead the path for us to define where Espress’EAU would fit in this ecosystem.
Julien Ducry
is the Cantonal Inspector of Water in the Canton of Vaud. He helped us understand the current regulations on phytosanitary products concentrations in the water network and how the controlling procedures were taking place. He also gave us feedback on our project and warned about the sensitivity of our device that is one of the biggest challenges.
Endre Horvath
CEO of Swoxid, a start-up for a low-tech water filter. Because of his experience in the domain of water-quality related hardware, we reached out to him to get his input on the Espress’EAU device.
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