Team:UGent2 Belgium/Attributions

Internal Attribution

Summary

Bram Benedicte Milan

Wet Lab:

Modeling:

Human Practices:

Design:

Presentation:

Videos:

Communication:

Proof Of Concept:

Sponsoring:

Safety:

Concept Development:

Bad Jokes:

Wiki:

Detailed

As a Team

Because we are only a very small but hard working team everyone was involved in almost all activities. So the main tasks like the conceptual development, research, interviewing experts, making the videos and so on, were a common effort. All of us worked together on every adjustment of the concept and because the group is so small we found a consensual solution for almost every problem. Though the higher flexibility and quicker decision making proved helpful to survive all the twists and turns our project had to make, having to distribute the tasks between just three people (working on their masters-thesis) made it a lot of work.
It is most likely that we forgot some bits and pieces but these are the most important point.

Bene

Benedicte Amery is our lab-specialist, she has been working hard in the laboratory of the Center for Synthetic Biology at the university of Ghent to enable the production of naringenin in Escherichia coli and Cupriavidus necator. This anti-inflammatory flavonoid could help fight off inflammations in the gut however the de novo production involves toxic solvents and is generally speaking unsustainable. She is also our main researcher in this area as well laboratory safety. The Cupriavidus was an especially hard to tame beast but she persisted and spent many hours assuring our synthetic biology part was not purely theoretical.
When we were still working on kombucha she was our vitamin researcher, looking for all the problems related to vitamin deficiency which we could solve with out product. She also gave kombucha brewing a shot and due to the nature of fermentation processes and the CO2 formation associated with it you can take that literally…

Bram

Bram Jacobs is our communication specialist, he did all the mailing, contacting and planning. He oftentimes was our presenter when meeting with new people, aided by his loyal powerpoint. He was the bridge between our team and the Ugent_Belgium team which we worked very closely together with. It may come as no surprise that he did our science communication as well by making instructional videos on Biopython and he was responsible for our modelling part. Bram also made the Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook account to make our project extra transparent for outsiders. You may recognise Bram from his amazing performance in our promotion video as “Bubbly”, the colourful, enthusiastic character.

Milan

Milan Van Nuffel is our wiki specialist, he made sure our website was easy to navigate while also making a color theme for it based on only the color blue. He started brewing kombucha in the early days of our project to get some hands on experience as well as insight into the process optimization.
When switching to the bubble he tried to automate the spherification process using his Arduino but this, as well as the research into the bubble matrix was stopped when Cosmofarma wanted to take over the laboratory testing of the bubble for us. He is also behind the idea for the promotion video and knows his way around with generic image editing software. And finally, he is the funniest team member and also the writer of this page, two totally unrelated things.

External Attribution


Prof. Dr. Ir. Marjan De Mey and Prof. Dr. Ir. Wim Van Crieckinge helped by organising brainstorms in the very beginning. From these brainstorms came ideas and so the teams were formed. They gave us feedback and insights from a lifetime of experience and gradually let us become more independent while still checking in on us every two weeks in the form of a teams meeting. Marjan also assisted in the wet and dry lab parts.

Our instructors José Manuel Salvador López, Ir. Lien De Wannemaeker , Dr. Ir. Michiel Stock, Ir. Louis Coussement helped us with reviewing, modelling, the Biopython videos , the wetlab and the drylab. They are the ones who helped us from the very beginning until the very end. Seriously even this sentence was reviewed by them ;).

Jelena Van Nuffel did the editing of our promotional video, which took a long time because image tracking software is not yet on point.

Waldo Vandermeiren was our cameraman for the promotional video.

Petra Van Gucht helped us finetuning our pitch and helped creating the prototype and did lab testing.

Kjell Vanhauwaert is responsible for a lot of the pictures on this website.

Lieven Debrauwer gave us a lot of inspirational ideas for the promotion video.