Team:Exeter/Attributions
Thank You!
The Exeter iGEM 2020 team would like to thank everybody who had a hand in our projects development. Without the generous help from a variety of university staff and professors, as well as numerous professionals from relevant industries, we would not have been able to produce the project that we our proud to show you today!
Everyone who has helped us get to the stage we are at now has been listed on this page along with their contribution.
Our Team
In our team we had no set roles or titles. We collected our team into smaller groups for different roles based on people’s previous experience and skill set. However, we used these groups as a learning opportunity to enhance our knowledge on topics we had less experience with. We did this by pairing members with less knowledge in an area in groups with more confident members. Synthetic biology is an interdisciplinary field reflected by the diversity in studies of our members. IGEM has allowed physics students the opportunity to experience a real functioning microbiology lab environment and likewise, biology students the opportunity to improve on our modelling. We have worked together as a team to explore and appreciate each other's worlds and learn how we can successfully bring them together to produce something great. Let’s meet the teams!
SynBio Team
Team SYNBIO were responsible for researching, designing and ordering all of our parts for our project. During early research stages of the project, our SYNBIO members took to studying relevant primary literature and information as well as previous wikis in order to gain a comprehensive overview of existing approaches aimed at tackling our issue. This provided us with a solid foundation to which we could explore new potential strategies.
This research soon evolved to speaking with experts and industry representatives to identify which of our ideas were viable. Once team SYNBIO has established which approaches we wished to experiment with in the lab they then took to designing the constructs and ordering the parts. Members of SYNBIO include Matthew Turk, Anna Donnan and Bethan Rimmer who were involved in construct and experimental design and Adam Bainbridge and Nina Senna who worked on investigating the enzymatic pathways and planning the protein assays.
LabRats
Team Lab-rats were responsible for carrying out a range of experiments including culturing, protein assays, transformations, protein extraction and co-culturing to name a few! Our biological scientists Matthew and Anna as well as medical sciences student Bethan and physicist Eloise Martin were the people behind our transformations. They were also responsible for plasmid construction, which was done though the new cloning strategy as well as the extraction of our plasmids from our molecular cloning bacteria, Eschericia coli DH5α, into our terminal chassis Bacillus subtilis WB800N through a series of mini preps. Our biochemists, Adam and Nina did a fantastic job of purifying and characterising our proteins in order to gain a better understanding of how they function. In addition, the pair carried out a series of preliminary experiments involving chemically precipitating calcium carbonate and visually observing, though microscopy, the resulting crystal formations in order to better understand the properties of the different calcium carbonate polymorphs such as aragonite, calcite and vaterite.
Collaborations Team
Team collaborations were responsible for identifying, creating and maintaining collaborations. This involved researching which other iGem team’s projects has overlap with our own and which we could potentially provide help for. This year, our team has the privilege of lab access during Covid-19, an opportunity that many teams did not have. This meant we could offer to carry out wet lab work for teams with no lab access. Our collaborations team established early on the desire to make a diverse range of meaningful collaborations both internationally and within the UK. We are very grateful to the teams we collaborated with and want to say a huge thank you for the wonderful level of communication and support they provided us with. It was a great experience to get to know other team members on a personal level through weekly update meetings. Our collaborations team members included Adam, Anna, Matthew and Velizar.
Modelling Team
With limited lab access this summer modelling was an ever more important part of iGEM 2020. Our team was extremely fortunate to have mathematician Velizar on our team, who was primarily responsible for the modelling of the diffusion of carbon dioxide in hydrogels. He did this using explicit and implicit finite differences in both one and two dimensions as well as chemical kinetics. He also conducted the data analysis for the carbon dioxide in the UK and globally. Pazzy was heavily involved in the numerical modelling of hydrogel properties as well as carbon dioxide diffusion modelling within the hydrogel. We could then apply experimental data collected in the lab to the above models providing us an insight to how we can improve our designs.
Outreach Team
Our outreach team members where in charge of the extremely important job of communicating with stakeholders, academics, industry experts, supporters and educational institutions. The team has the added challenge this year of operating during the Covid-19 pandemic, limiting communication and potential sources of outreach in some cases. However, this also offered an opportunity to be creative, sourcing alternative methods of communication and thinking of new ways we could convey our project to people. This included organising zoom meetings and creating videos, PowerPoints and webinars to explain our project or to teach people about synthetic biology! This job ultimately decided on our project’s outcome. From these discussions we gathered information and advice which helped direct and shape our project. We really appreciate the time and effort people made to speak with us especially during the challenges Covid-19 presented. The magnitude of outreach meant all members of our team were involved in different aspects. Adam, Anna, Bethan, Nina, Matthew and Velizar were heavily involved with science communication, contacting industry representatives and experts in various STEM fields. Izzy, Ariane, Pazzy and Eloise produced our wonderful series of animated webinar videos aimed at teaching secondary school students about all things synthetic biology! Izzy wrote and illustrated the teams inclusive story book aimed at teaching young children about the wonderful opportunities that synthetic biology possesses in an exciting and engaging manor.
Wiki Team
Our Wiki was an opportunity for us to show all the work we have done throughout the summer to the iGEM judges and other iGEM teams. Adam and Bethan did an incredible job at coding our wiki and ensuring that it was informative, navigable and interactive to provide our viewers with a positive experience.
Hardware Team
Our project’s ultimate goal was to produce a 3D bio-printer that used a self-hardening ‘ink’ composed of our genetically modified bacteria and specifically designed hydrogel that solidified the shape through microbially induced calcification. In order to produce such a printer, many considerations were required. Patric, Ariane, Eloise, and Izzy were involved in designing and testing a range of hydrogels as well as modelling how they would behave in the 3D printer under a range of conditions.Velizar considered the engineering of the printer hardware itself including chamber and nozzle design while Anna and Matthew considered how bacteria within the printer would survive and be activated.
Safety Team
Microbiological laboratories can be hazardous environments if not handled correctly. Our Health and safety team were responsible for considering all the potential risks involved in our project including researching into what microorganisms we can safely use in the lab. From this risk assessment, the necessary safety protocols could be put in place to minimise risk. In addition, this team did an extremely thorough job of filling out the iGEM safety form. Members included Matthew, Eloise, Bethan and Velizar.
Our Team
Adam
Adam’s intelligence and insightful thinking are the reason we are where we are today. He anticipated and solved many potential problems of our initial designs, saving the team much time and trouble. Adam has worked on all aspects of iGEM. In particular, he played a pivotal role in keeping the team on track and meeting deadlines. He also took the enormous responsibility of coding our beautiful wiki page, showcasing all our work in an engaging and informative way. Adam has been extremely dedicated to the team throughout the project and his humour has meant working with him has been a joy.
Anna
Anna has been a highly motivated and valued member of our team. Throughout the project she has taken on a vast number of roles. She has been instrumental in creating meaningful and long lasting collaborations with other iGEM teams as well as reaching out to relevant industries to help guide our project in the right direction. Her lab skills have been highly useful and she has put considerable effort into making sure that our work has always been carried out to the best of our abilities. Anna has been a key member on the biology side as well, contributing heavily to the design of our bacteria. Her enthusiasm and commitment to the project as well as her attitude has been second to none, and she designed some brilliant stash for us as well!
Ariane
Ariane has been such an asset to our team in several ways, and the effort she has put into the project has been truly appreciated. She would always bring creative ideas and different perspectives to our meetings, which have been essential for the development of our project. Focusing mainly on the design of our hydrogel, she has a skill for quickly understanding the complex science behind the tasks we faced, which was invaluable in the process of designing relevant experiments. She was also enthusiastic to get involved with time in the lab and contributed to our science communication campaign.
Bethan
Bethan is a one of a kind teammate; from lab work to wiki coding, safety form to infographics, she has managed to accomplish so much within the project. The team would not know what to do without her genius insights and quick thinking- if anything goes wrong, she always seems to have a comprehensive plan to fix it. She’s an incredibly hard worker and on top of that, a lovely person to chat to. Reliable, intelligent and a pleasure to work with.
Eloise
The positivity and enthusiasm with which Eloise Martin has approached every task has without a doubt been instrumental to the success of our project. She has taken every opportunity to immerse herself in the unfamiliar environment of the biology lab, where she has tackled both engineering and biology based experiments with great proficiency. In addition to her invaluable contributions to the modelling of the hydrogel, the wonderful illustrations she has produced for our science communication videos are testament to her immense creativity and artistic capabilities.
Izzy
Izzy brought her infectious enthusiasm and passion for science to every element of ‘CalcifEXE’ she was involved with. Her artistic talent and design experience have been a major asset to the team, with Izzy being heavily involved in the design of our Instagram posts and wiki illustrations, as well as being vital to the production of some of our animated video ‘webinars’ and our children’s story book, helping us communicate science and the team’s morals surrounding inclusivity and diversity to an incredibly broad audience. When not working on science communication, Izzy could often be found playing an instrumental role in the team’s understanding of hydrogel physics and modelling.
Matthew
As well as being a super nice and warm guy, Matthew has shown such a great amount of enthusiasm for the project right from the get go! His focus on outreaching to not just universities but other scientific communities such as schools and colleges has given our team many novel opportunities not seen before. He’s also done a lot of work on the biological side of our project including parts, safety and spending many long hours in the lab doing transformations. Even when all of our experiments haven’t been successful, he won’t groan, but find new solutions. Overall a great guy to work with on this project!
Nina
Nina’s character and abilities breathe life and colour into our group. Particularly during the starting stage of the project, her enthusiasm helped enhance the gelling of the group together despite the current circumstances. Over the course of the project, her care towards her colleagues has earned her our respect and admiration. Her diverse creative and academic skillset naturally gravitated her to a leadership position for laboratory and project design work. As a result she has had an immense impact on the project and her most notable contributions to the CalcifEXE project have been in: project logo design, social media design and management as well as creating the synbio pathway for calcium carbonate precipitation.
Pazzy
Pazzy’s humour and optimism have kept up group morale throughout our project journey. He played a central role in polishing our project image by using his video-editing skills to record and put together our project video, as well as creating some other educational videos. Overall his contribution to making public outreach more engaging and accessible has been incredibly valuable to our science communication efforts. On top of helping with the video deadline he also worked in the background researching equations relevant to hydrogel mechanics and applying his physics expertise to solve them.
Velizar
No one can question Velizar's commitment to this project. Not only has he been at the forefront of the modelling team, he has also been instrumental at coordinating and communicating with other teams we are collating with- especially the ones that involved modelling. By bringing his mathematical knowledge into our team he offered us new ways to look into our carbon dioxide diffusion modelling that we would have never considered. He must also be commended for writing a major part of all human practices work that was needed. And he accomplished it all whilst still keeping up with the biology and chemistry involved in the project, which he furiously researched and learnt, even though it was not necessarily needed for him to do so. Overall, a major team player whose work ethic is strong as he is.
Our Supervisors
We consider ourselves immensely lucky to be working under the guidance of such talented and supportive supervisors. The enthusiasm and passion they shared for iGem and their academic fields was hugely motivating for the team, and furthered our appreciation for synthetic biology. Not only did they teach us everything we needed to know in terms of synthetic biology, but they guided us though many other aspects of the project. This ranged from recognising the importance of working as a team, teaching us about the ins and outs of science research, learning fundamental lab skills, how to communicate with industries and engage the public, the importance of responsible innovation and the list goes on! They have been a great help in informing all of our carrier paths and it has been a pleasure to work with them. We want to say an enormous thank you to our supervisors for the amount of time and energy they provided us with. We had such a wonderful time getting to know them!
Dr Chloe Singleton
There is no doubt that Dr Chloe Singleton has been our iGem mother. She has guided us with her phenomenal teaching to help us understand the hardest to grasp concepts. She has shown incredible commitment to the team always being on hand to help. We all can say our knowledge on synthetic biology has grown significantly due to her. In particular, she was a great help in designing our chassis. Dr Singleton ensured the team was always on track and meeting deadlines. Her intelligence, humour and kindness created a positive environment for the team to get to know one another and we can't thank her enough!
Dr Mark Hewlett
We could not be where we are without the support of Dr Hewlett. His depth of knowledge on molecular biology has been instrumental to our project. Dr Hewlett really helped us to develop our ideas into realistic and achievable outcomes. The help he provided us within the laboratory was particularly useful for us, giving us a rare opportunity for hands on lab experience where we learned and perfected new techniques. He has been a constant source of encouragement and support throughout iGem and his recommendations to potentially useful sources of information have always been rewarding.
Dr Hewlett provided much help to us in the lab and was responsible for purification of our carbonic anhydrase enzyme as well as prep work involving culturing our bacteria.
Professor John love
It was clear from the start that Professor John Love had high ambitions for the team. His belief in our capabilities and encouragement was hugely motivating for us all. Professor Love's incredible scientific insight and 'big picture' thinking made us critically evaluate the core principles and potential applications of our project. He always encouraged creative and out of the box thinking; no idea was too wacky! His guidance and feedback has been invaluable to us.
Dr Paul James
Dr Paul James has been a valued advisor to the Exeter iGem team. During the early stages of the project Dr Paul James provided us with a wealth of information to the iGem process and generating ideas in general. We are thankful for all of the information and guidance he has given us.
Dr James provided us with many protocols for example protein purification which helped us greatly with our lab work.
Outsourced Knowledge
There are many individuals we would like to thank for helping our team. We were amazed by the response, encouragement and level of support we received from people. Directly communicating with experts in the fields ensured we gained a comprehensive understanding of the current challenges industries and scientists face when tackling our issue. Their knowledge facilitated the design of our project. We have learned a great deal about the importance of public relations, science communication and outreach.
Professor Mike Allen
Professor Mike Allen: Professor Mike Allen is an Associate Professor of Single Cell Genomics. Our meeting with Professor Allen was hugely beneficial for the team. During the meeting we discussed how we can best apply our technique for coral preservation and who within the industry would be interested in our research. In addition to his academic knowledge, he also provided the team with advice on building public relationships, highlighting the significance of doing this. His enthusiasm for our project was incredibly motivating to us.
Mr Tim Gordon
The team also spoke with Mr Tim Gordan, a PhD student studying the human impacts on natural acoustics in the ocean. Mr Gordan provided the team with sound advice on how we can maximise our public outreach in a limited time period and how to analyse our public impact in order to tailor our outreach work to specific audiences. Under his guidance, we adapted our social media strategies in order to maximise its impact.
Mr Edward Hollis
Mr Edward Hollis, an MsC student studying Engineering at Exeter University, consulted the team on our bio-printers nozzle design. He provided the team with a simple and practical solution to a design issue we encountered. Mr Hollis kindly donated his time to engineer us an initial prototype CAD nozzle design to which we could make further improvements on.
Dr Rebecca Hooper
Dr Rebecca Hooper has been a particularly important individual to our project. Dr Hooper is the British Lime Association Director and Senior Energy and Environment Advisor at MPA. The team’s meaningful discussions with Dr Hooper had an exceptional impact on the direction of our project. Aside from the abundance of enthusiasm and support she gave us, she took the team though an A-Z of the limestone production industry as well as providing us with very useful leads.
Mrs Jenny Rusk
Ms Jenny Rusk was a wonderful help to our science communication team, advising us on how to tailor our educational videos to specific target audiences in order to ensure they are exciting, engaging and convey knowledge at an appropriate academic level.
Professor Sarah Hartley
Professor Sarah Hartley is an interdisciplinary social scientist working closely with natural scientists, engineers, regulators and policy-makers. Initial meetings with Professor Hartley were vital to the team in making us consider the wider impacts our project could have on society. She educated the team on the importance of innovation and introduced us to a series of frameworks, shown here, to apply and consider throughout our projects development. She was extremely encouraging of the team and made a big impact on our human practice elements.
Professor Steve Simpson
Professor Steve Simpson is a marine biologist and fish ecologist, with particular interests in the behaviour of coral reef fishes, bioacoustics, effects of climate change on marine ecosystems, fisheries, conservation and management. Professor Simpson generously donated his time to the iGem team and provided us with a wealth of knowledge on current methods for aiding coral development, a background to corals and how we could optimise our backbone design to support a diverse range of coral reef ecosystem members. In addition to his knowledge, Professor Simpson kindly provided us with audio clips of underwater acoustics made by coral reef communities which were featured in the sound track of 'Blue Planet II'. We used these clips for our 'EXETER iGEM 2020' animated video introduction!
Mr Jonathan Teague
Our team also contacted Mr Teague, a PhD student researching current practises for monitoring coral health. Mr Teague kindly directed us to several useful information sources including researchers and relevant scientific articles.
Dr Sam Stevens
Dr Stevens provided us a wealth of advice regarding which method of crystal morphology identification would be best suited to our project. In addition to his scientific contribution, Dr Stevens was an enormous help to us in the planning of our wiki page, stemming from his knowledge of web design. We have taken his advice onboard and incorporated several of his suggestions onto our wiki.
Sponsors and Supporters
We would like to thank our 2020 sponsors the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) for providing us with the funding necessary to carry out our research. The BBSRC is one of the biggest public organisations funding scientific research in the UK. We could not have completed our project without their support. We would also like to thank the University of Exeter for providing us with access to facilities including the Bioeconomy Centre and a study space in the Peter Chalk building - something we are incredibly grateful for given the difficulty of organising access to public spaces during the pandemic. Finally we would like to thank Snapgene and Geneious who provided our team with software licenses. Geneious Prime is the world's leading bioinformatics software platform for molecular biology and sequence analysis and Snapgene is a program for accurately designing and simulate cloning procedures. One of our Snapgene designed constructs can be viewed on the design page of our wiki. These programs made identifying genes and constructing our plasmids more straightforward.
Social Media Team
Team social media had a big job from the get go! They set up our social media accounts and insured they were packed full of informative and engaging information for both the general public, iGEM teams, stakeholders and academics. They also had the vital role of sharing our project with people and how it evolved and changed with our research.
Team social media was also responsible for collecting data from our supporter's in order to receive public feedback to which we could adapt our project to. This was done though a series of questionnaires as well as question and answer sessions. We are aware that many people following our accounts do not come from a science background and we wanted our project to be accessible to everyone. In order to do this, team social media made a series of posts that used illustrations to explain our project, background about the iGEM competition and information on synthetic biology.
Initially social media was the responsibility of Anna, Izzy, Nina and Pazzy but in the end we were all involved to some extent after our content branched out into infographics, science communication and videos!