Team
Julia Ball: As our team captain, member of the Human Practices and Wetlab Committees, Julia helped organize our team, communicated with other iGEM teams, advisors, and experts through almost 100 emails, helped fill out safety forms, organized the recruitment for next year’s team, and was the primary point of contact with the iGEM organization overall. Also, Julia wrote the code of ethical conduct, worked on the blog for the iGEM engineering school website, and helped develop the resource hub. As part of the DNA subteam of the Wetlab committee, Julia helped design the DNA scaffold procedures and worked in the lab.
Veronica Gutierrez: As a member of the Wetlab, Wiki, and Entrepreneurship committees, Veronica helped research and write procedures regarding the construction of the BMC, aided in the overall structure and organization of the wiki and helped collect details on current or pending patents. In the lab, Veronica worked with Colin Haws to go through the different procedures pertaining to BMC formation and analyze the results.
Colin Haws: As head of the modeling committee and member of the Wetlab committee, Colin focused on leading the modeling efforts to describe the efficiency of the MANIFOLD system. More specifically he worked on the promotor calculator and the reaction kinetics models. In Wetlab, Colin helped in the collection and assembly of BMC parts, both in the lab and virtually, and worked on the BMC procedures in the lab with Veronica.
Aparna Kola: As co-head of the entrepreneurship committee and member of the Human Practices and Modeling Committee, Aparna worked on ____
Sophia Link: As a member of the Wetlab and Wiki committees, Sophia worked on the design of the DNA scaffold and helped with the writeup and organization of Reverse transcriptase assembly Wetlab procedures. In addition, Sophia created most (if not all) of MANIFOLD’s graphics, including the one on our home page and the design of the flowcharts that can be seen on the experiments page.
Collin Marino:
Edward (Eddie) Micklovic: As part of the Human Practices committee, Eddie spearheaded the Virginia iGEM podcast series “Mick and Mates”, filming and editing the videos and sound. In addition, Eddie helped work on the code of ethical conduct.
Dev Patel: As head of the Human Practices Committee and member of the Wetlab, wiki, and modeling, Dev worked on writing the code of ethical conduct and most of the wiki write-up for the Human Practices committee. In modeling, Dev worked with Pietro to develop the NetLogo model to show substrate movement in BMCs. In addition, in Wetlab, Dev helped research collect and write the procedures for the Enzyme subteam, inputting those into Benchling, along with any sequences.
Jacob Polzin: As head of the Wiki committee and member of the Modeling and Wetlab committees, Jacob ____
Apekchha Pradhan: As a member of the Wetlab, Entrepreneurship, and Wiki committees, Apekchha was in charge of forming the sequences and parts for the 4Cl and STS enzymes in the resveratrol pathway. She worked with Peitro and Jacob in the lab, following the protocols for their enzyme sub-team. She also took part in helping build the wiki and got to be more familiar with web design and HTML/CSS.
Pietro Revelli: As co-head of then Entrepreneurship Committee and member of the Wetlab and Modeling, Pietro worked on the market analysis of resveratrol, applied to countless grants and made the budget for the team. In addition, on the modeling team, Pietro worked on the Cobra Toolbox in Python and Matlab and was the one who pointed out the importance of the ACS and ACC in the resveratrol pathway.
Advisors
Dr. Keith Kozminski:__
Ms. Kathryn Christopher: ___
Dr. Jason Papin : Dr. Papin is our iGEM sponsor and the backbone of our modeling efforts. After the formulation of our device, our talks with Dr. Papin helped us to understand the questions we need to answer and therefore the models we need to create in order to answer such questions. Dr. Papin also shared with us his own research labs resources to help us understand our models and create better outputs for presentation.
Wetlab Advising and Support
Dr. Cheryl Kerfeld:We begin by cold-emailing Dr. Cheryl Kerfeld, a renowned researcher out of UCLA and Michigan State with a long history of experimenting with BMCs. Dr. Kerfeld agreed to talk about her cutting-edge BMC research, even explaining her current work on customizable BMC shells, and also gave feedback on our initial project ideas. She immediately took to our concepts, and she afforded us the endorsement of a researcher who's worked with BMCs for decades. She gave us multiple contacts for other top BMC researchers, as well as a better understanding of her field of work, all of which better helped us move forward.
Professor Martin Warren: We also reached out to Professor Martin Warren at the University of Kent in the UK after reading a paper of his. What began as a chance email became a continued dialogue about the initial paper of interest, as well as his pertinent work with BMCs. He also agreed to share a plasmid described in his paper, which provided us with the sequence, the ability to partially replicate his findings, and a much faster route to creating our final device.
Dr. Laura Fontenas: One protocol that no one on our team had previously performed is qPCR. This led to our advisor connecting us to Dr. Laura Fontenas, a research associate at UVA. She was happy to share her qPCR protocol, recommendations, steps for designing primers, and any other advice we may need during our lab work.
George McArthur: Further into the summer, we reached out to George McArthur, the founder of the Virginia iGEM Team, Director of Genetic Design-Build at Arzeda, and new Head of Product at Ansa Biotechnologies, Inc. We did a short presentation for him on the wetlab component of our project, and he gave us advice on next steps for the project: get funding, find other ways to market the device (ie. expand its applications) and figure out how to get data without having normal access to our lab (outsource to Teselagen/Honeybee/Culture Biosciences).
Human Practices Advising and Support
Dr. Lois Shepherd: Early on, we reached out to Dr. Shepherd, a UVA Bioethicist, to gain insights into the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. We were looking for information on good practice and the stipulations required to go beyond the typical legal and safety confined. She advised us to assess how we can actually benefit society despite the restrictions of patent monopolies, and suggested we write a Code of Ethical Conduct to organize our findings. She stressed important questions regarding what we wanted to accomplish with our project, who it would affect, and how we could balance benefits, risks, and harms. Dr. Shepherd then pointed us to Professor Riley, a fellow UVA Bioethicist, for ethical advice more specific to synthetic biology.
Professor Mimi Riley: Now armed with the relevant questions and our tentative answers, we reached out to Professor Riley, a professor of law, PHS, and public policy at UVA, and the chair of UVA's Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee, as well as a legal advisor to the Health Sciences Institutional Review Board. In our first meetings, we asked general questions regarding synthetic biology society, and our conversations gradually shifted to discussing the current social movements occurring in the country, and if we have a role as a research team to take a stance on such issues. We spoke intensely about our capability to positively and directly impact our community as a team of researchers, and we learned the true difficulty of going beyond merely making a statement and moving on. Through this, Professor Riley encouraged us to think internally first and to detail our own responsibilities and actions before blindly charging into the public eye. She further endorsed the idea of a COEC, as a means to debate and understand our values as a team and how they affect the work we put out into society. Professor Riley later reviewed our COEC gave us direct advice on individual statements and sections, and how to finalize this document for others to adapt and improve.
Modeling Advising and Support
Dr. Keith Kozminski:__
Ms. Kathryn Christopher: ___
Dr. Jason Papin : Dr. Papin is our iGEM sponsor and the backbone of our modeling efforts. After the formulation of our device, our talks with Dr. Papin helped us to understand the questions we need to answer and therefore the models we need to create in order to answer such questions. Dr. Papin also shared with us his own research labs resources to help us understand our models and create better outputs for presentation.
Wiki Advising and Support
Dr. Keith Kozminski:__
Ms. Kathryn Christopher: ___
Dr. Jason Papin : Dr. Papin is our iGEM sponsor and the backbone of our modeling efforts. After the formulation of our device, our talks with Dr. Papin helped us to understand the questions we need to answer and therefore the models we need to create in order to answer such questions. Dr. Papin also shared with us his own research labs resources to help us understand our models and create better outputs for presentation.
Entrepreneurship, Legal and/or Business Advising and Support
Dr. Keith Kozminski:__
Ms. Kathryn Christopher: ___
Dr. Jason Papin : Dr. Papin is our iGEM sponsor and the backbone of our modeling efforts. After the formulation of our device, our talks with Dr. Papin helped us to understand the questions we need to answer and therefore the models we need to create in order to answer such questions. Dr. Papin also shared with us his own research labs resources to help us understand our models and create better outputs for presentation.
And a special thanks too...
Dr. Keith Kozminski:__
Ms. Kathryn Christopher: ___
Dr. Jason Papin : Dr. Papin is our iGEM sponsor and the backbone of our modeling efforts. After the formulation of our device, our talks with Dr. Papin helped us to understand the questions we need to answer and therefore the models we need to create in order to answer such questions. Dr. Papin also shared with us his own research labs resources to help us understand our models and create better outputs for presentation.
