Team:ULaval/Attributions
ATTRIBUTIONS
Our project was designed and managed by our student members with advice from our mentors. We also led all fundraising activities and performed all experiments and analyses from both the wet and dry labs. None of our members worked full-time on this project at any point of the competition, and we did not receive any financial compensation for our work. Our team had a flat organization, that is, our team did not establish a hierarchy between members. As such, all decisions were taken during team meetings and all members had the chance to develop their leadership skills.
Our project aims to develop a treatment to convert ropy maple syrup into a marketable product. As such, our team members sought to reach out to experts to learn more about the field and discuss avenues to develop our project. Emilie, Benjamin, Louis-Jacques, Joanna, Catherine, Marianne, Angel, Olivier, José, and Djebran participated in those online calls with experts. The discussion helped us understand the shortcomings of our early proposals until we settled on our final project: engineering an enzyme (dextranase) to degrade the dextrans that characterize ropy syrup. To do this, Angel and Louis-Jacques used computational tools to identify and model a candidate enzyme that could work effectively in a maple production setting. Later, Emilie and Benjamin ordered the sequences and planned the experiments.
To cover our expenses related to attending the Giant Jamboree and laboratory work, our team members were responsible for raising money. Louis-Jacques, Martine and Angel filled fellowship applications recognising student’s implication and engagement offered by non-lucrative organism. Benjamin launched and managed our Gofundme page while members spend time looking for sponsors and contacting both local and national companies (Danilo, Joanna, Olivier, Emilie, Benjamin, Angel, José). Jean-Michel and Danilo were responsible for the finances management and production of appropriate financial reports for non-profit organization.
An iGEM project requires a lot of communications efforts to reach other teams and more general audiences. We designed our wiki so that information about our project could be accessible for everybody. All of our team members were involved in these efforts, with Marianne and Catherine writing all the necessary code and Catherine, Marianne, Angel, Louis-Jacques, Benjamin, Joanna, and Emilie writing the text for the different pages. Similarly, our team understands the importance of using social networks to communicate with general audiences. Catherine, Candice, Martine, Joanna, and Emilie were in charge of managing our social networks and creating the content for our posts. Finally, we produced several deliverables for the Giant Jamboree. Olivier, Emilie, Marianne, Louis-Jacques, Catherine, Joanna, and Angel prepared a promotion video explaining our project.
We would like to thank everyone who helped us with our collaborations, each event was organized by multiple people from our team. Our JulyGEM presentation was organized by Angel, Emilie and Benjamin. Both Emilie and Angel presented our presentation the day of. Our iGEM team collaborated with iGEM Concordia to organize two conferences. From our team, Angel, Emilie, Joanna and Benjamin helped organize the event. We also participated in Concordia’s MiniJamboree Event. Benjamin was the person from our team who presented our poster. Thanks to him, we got helpful feedback for the Giant Jamboree poster presentation. Finally, we also participated in Delft’s iGEM video, where they promoted team projects all over the world. Louis-Jacques filmed our video, Emilie featured in it, and Angel and Marianne helped write our script.
For our Human Practices, we wanted to include as many people as possible from our team to help. Everyone from our team either assisted, took notes or organized an interview with an expert this year. We also wrote a survey for maple syrup producers, Louis-Jacques wrote this survey and Jean-François Sénéchal gave us important feedback on the ethics of this survey. Jose interpreted all the data we gathered from this survey. Joanna also wrote a survey for the clients of our potential product. This survey will be adapted and put out next year, when we have a better idea of the product we will create.
We would like to thank every single expert that helped our project along the way. Thanks to you, our project has made it so far.
Special thanks to:
Michel Guertin for general support, for concluding our meetings when he was too hungry and for giving us a lot of information about synthetic biology
Hélène Deveau for general support and helping us with the molecular biology behind the project
Steve Charette for general support, helping us with the science aspect of the project and giving us contact information for people on campus
Jean-Michel Proulx for managing our bank account
Martine Voisine for helping us write our applications for fellowships and manage our social network
Danilo Tubic for creating a sponsorship document that we could use to reach out to potential sponsors
Djebran Alkozai for participating in and organizing some meetings with experts and reached out for graphic design advice for our logo
José Campano for analyzing a survey for maple producers and helping us find our final project
William Chevarie for participating in some brainstorming sessions for our project
Olivier Lavoie for participating in some meetings with experts and helping us plan our promotion video
Candice Lemaille for helping us manage our social networks
Catherine Marois for helping us with scholarship applications
Carla Bautista for advice on our project as a mentor
Florian Echelard for advice on our project as a mentor
François Rouleau for advice on our project as a mentor
Marie Filteau for giving us crucial information about maple syrup production, maple tube biofilms, buddy syrup and ropy syrup.
Jean-François Sénéchal for giving us feedback on our maple syrup producer survey and a presentation on ethics in science
Luc Lagacé for informing us on producers habits and guiding us on our project this year
Vincent Poisson for confirming the importance of Ropy syrup in maple syrup production, giving us other project ideas and guiding us on projects that are done by others in Québec.
Jean-Michel Lavoie for giving us feedback on our project and informing us about other projects done in Québec
MAPAQ for giving us information about the laws and restriction in Québec
PPAQ for opening the door to a potentiel confidentiality agreement giving us more information that will be helpful to our project
Manon Couture for giving us helpful insight on our dextranase characterization
Patrick Lagüe for helping us choose our dextranase candidates and modeling
Stéphane Gagné for helping us choose our dextranase
Rong Shi for helping us choose our dextranase and giving us information about expression vectors
Simon Hardy for helpful discussions regarding modelling enzymatic activity.
Marie-Ève Picard for giving us information on protein expression and purification protocols
Marie-Ève Paquet for giving us information about expression vector construction and opening up her lab to us
All the maple producers who answered our survey