Team:DTU-Denmark/Attributions

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Team Members

Antonia Griesz

Antonia was a member of the dry lab, human practices and economy subgroups. She successfully applied for different grants together with Emil and engaged throughout the duration of the project with different industrial stakeholders. In the second half of the project, Antonia helped in creating the genome-scale metabolic model and coded part of the wiki page as well as contributed to its content.

Anusha Arun Kumar

Anusha was a part of Wetlab and was involved in genomic integration of Pmo subunits. She was also a part of PR/SoME, Team building, Animations and Wiki page content writing. She was the creator of the Children’s book and the postcard under Education & Communication and Collaborations respectively. She along with Gunnhildur enjoyed late nights in the lab looking for successful transformations.

Chen Chen

Chen Chen was a part of team building, dry lab and wiki subgroups. She helped in creating the genome-scale metabolic model and spent a part of her summer learning a new programming language (Kivy) to help our app development. Chen coded and designed certain wiki pages.

Cristina Bulancea

Cristina was a part of our economy, team building, human practices and wet lab subgroups. Before starting her Bachelor’s degree, she had already graduated as a laboratory assistant, therefore she was a huge help in the lab. In the start of the 2021 autumn semester, she had the opportunity to go on exchange to Chicago. It was a huge loss for the team to have to say goodbye to Cristina early, but we are excited to have her back at DTU soon.

Emil Ørsted Christensen

Emil is our finance master keeping track of the economy throughout iGEM. He was mostly responsible for designing parts for the project and uploading it to the registry. He, along with Katarzyna were part of the subgroup testing knockouts in the K. phaffii ΔKU70 GS115 strain and also contributed to the wiki. Signe, Karen and him hosted the seminar and workshop for high school students. He and Signe always made sure we are well fed during the wiki freeze week by cooking all our meals.

Enric Cristòbal Cóppulo

There has never been a more patient man than Enric, who put endless efforts into the team building activities for our team. Enric was also a vital part of the wiki and dry lab subgroups, where he was responsible for the Genome Scale Metabolic model of our designed K. phaffii strain. Enric’s efforts contributed greatly to the human practices subgroup and during collaborations with other iGEM teams, where he among other things contacted stakeholders and presented our project during a visit to Ampliqon as well as in the Nordic iGEM Conference.

Gunnhildur Gretarsdottir

Gunnhildur was a part of the administration, wet lab and wiki subgroups. She planned the general meetings and is an expert in our sequencing results. She spent the first part of the summer constructing plasmids in the lab before taking charge of the pMMO subgroup.

Ildikó Lékai

Ildikó was a part of administration, PR/SoMe, wet lab, and wiki content writing. She was a part of the genomic integration of the Pmo subunits subgroup along with Anusha and Gunnhildur. As a part of PR/SoMe she loved looking for content across different platforms and creating content for our team’s platforms.

Karen Therkelsen

Karen was an integral part of the Ethics and Politics part of the Human practices subgroup along with Karl. Karen was the most diligent team member when it came to our Benchling entries and, together with Signe, was responsible for the hemoglobin subgroup. The parts registry would have been a chaos without her efforts. She was involved in high school education and promotional video content.

Karl-Kristian Kaether

Karl was a part of the economy, dry lab and human practices, where he along with Karen took responsibility for the political outreach of our project. Karl found the signal peptide for directing the PmoABC subunits to the correct membrane. Karl was responsible for the AOX model.

Katarzyna Wiśniewska

Katarzyna (Kasia) was a part of wetlab, collaborations, PR/SoMe and wiki writing. She was a part of the knockout subgroup with Emil. She was ensuring all our posts were going up on social media platforms and signed us up for Nordic iGEM Conference (NiC) which was important for us to get feedback before the competition.

Signe Vangsgaard

Signe was a part of Wetlab, Human Practices, PR/SoMe, Team building, Video, animations and wiki content writing. She was responsible for the hemoglobin subgroup. She was the main person involved in promotional video and presentation video. She contributed to the high school education and animations. She was our chef along with Emil during the wiki freeze week.

Thomas Carvalho Andersen

Thomas was a part of our administration, team building, dry lab and video subgroups. Further, Thomas was the head of the wiki subgroup, where he organised the general workflow and distributed tasks. Thomas was also the main responsible for the app development.

Yanan Zhao

Yanan was a part of our team building, wiki and dry lab subgroups. Yanan was the CSS styling expert of our team and contributed greatly to the overall design of our wiki page. She helped in project brainstorming, creating the genome-scale metabolic model and kill curve experiment.

Supervisors

We would like to send special thanks to our supervisors, who have continuously guided and supported us until the last day of our project.

Christopher Workman (Associate Professor, DTU Bioengineering)

With his many years of experience being part of the iGEM community, Chris was our go-to person when we needed input with our project, we could always count on him giving us valuable feedback.

Kyle Rothschild-Mancinelli (iGEM Alumnus and Ph.D., DTU Bioengineering)

Being an iGEM veteran, Kyle was always ready to challenge us in every aspect of our project. His advice and feedback was always incredibly helpful, especially in the hours leading up to the wiki freeze.

Benjamin Schwetz (Ph.D., IT University of Copenhagen)

Benjamin wasn't afraid to give us constructive feedback on our approaches, both in wet as well as in dry lab subgroups and he provided expertise as he was part of a previous iGEM team.

Henrik Toft Simonsen (CEO of Mosspiration Biotech IVS & Associate Professor, DTU Bioengineering)

Henrik was always ready to put our ideas into a new perspective. With his experience from both MossTech and DTU, he was always there to give advice. He encouraged us to see iGEM not only as an engineering competition, but also as an opportunity to make great friends, and we have surely followed his advice. ;)

Louise Kastberg and August Frost (PhD students, DTU Bioengineering)

Our saviors when it comes to wetlab. As typical Ph.D students they spend most of their time in the lab - and so did we. We definitely took advantage of them being there, whenever we got stuck. They were always ready to help us with troubleshooting after our experiments didn’t work for the 5th time, and were forever patient with us and our many questions. Thank you so much for all your help.

External contributions

Faculty support

Tomas Strucko: He was kind enough to provide us with plasmids, plasmid maps and a lot of theoretical knowledge when it comes to genome editing, all of it being a crucial part of our project.

Uffe Hasbro Mortensen: Uffe has given us permission to use plasmids developed by his research group. He has also provided theoretical counseling.

Pablo Torres Montero: Pablo helped us navigate our way through the lab from the beginning and was always patient with us. He shared his vast expertise of Biolector, which has saved several times.

Fabiano Contesini: His experience as a supervisor for previous iGEM teams was helpful for this year’s team as well. He took time to explain and elaborate on experimental results and was available for further advice as needed.

José Luis Martinez Ruiz: He assisted us with the shake flask fermentation experiment, Biolector, and allowed us to borrow equipment.

Jannie Felskov Agersten: She helped all of us get our required lab training and was always there for us, whenever we had questions in the lab.

Tina Johansen: She helped all of us get our required lab training.

Wiebke Marina Findeisen: She helped all of us get our required lab training and was always there for us, whenever we had questions in the lab.

Leila Limani: She was always kind to us and answered our questions. She helped us get our sterile media fast when the autoclave broke in our building.

Regitse Bergen: She helped all of us get our required lab training.

Irene Hjort Jacobsen: She helped all of us get our required lab training and was always there for us, whenever we had questions in the lab.

Deniz Durmusoglu: She provided us her protocol for Golden Gate Assembly.

Jens Preben Morth: As former consultant for Unibio, he has given us advise on the co-culturing idea, and has put us in contact with Unibio.

Maja Horst (DTU, Department of Technology, Management and Economics): Gave us feedback on our content for public outreach and shared her experience with public engagement.

Niko Sonnenschein: Niko helped us with the initiation and validation of the GSM modelling thanks to its extensive expertise on the field of Metabolic engineering. He provided several ideas for model improvement, as well as productive cooperation between our wetlab and drylab teams.

Irini Angelidaki (DTU Chemical Engineering): Irini provided us with valuable advice about the main components of our project and helped us explore the possibility of co-culturing.

Outreach

Benjamín Sanchez (Chr. Hansen, Chalmers University of Technology): Benjamín helped our team to get an expert point of view of the GSM model and the meeting with him was very productive and interesting as he was one of the developers of GECKO, a very innovative tool in the GSM field.

Kenneth Jensen (Novozymes): Kenneth helped us with the development of our idea, based on his advice we dismissed our initial co-culturing idea and he also provided valuable input in the later fermentation set-up.

Ib Christensen and Subir Kumar Nandy (Unibio): Ib and Subir provided us with extremely helpful input when it comes to co-culturing and use of pMMO. They have kindly offered to let us use the U-loop reactor in their headquarters in Kalundborg in case our project reaches the big-scale fermentation step.

Viola von Cramon-Taubnadel (Member of the European Parliament of the Green Party): She gave us insight about the GMO regulations within the EU.

Eric Allain (Novozymes North America): Eric helped us in the development of our GSM model and gave us great advice, based on which we looked into transcriptomic data to obtain promoter strength.

Alexandre Huchelmann and Ilaria Ciabattio (EU Health and Food Safety): They gave us valuable insight into the GMO regulations in the EU and worldwide.

Mikkel Swartz: Mikkel took our team portraits and filmed and edited both our promotional and presentation videos.

Mr and Mrs. Olivarius: For kindly letting us borrow their greenhouse for the filming of our promotional video.

Jacqueline Landau: As an experienced music video and movie director, Jacqueline provided a lot of artistic viewpoints and helped us to make an impact into society with our promotional video.

Johanne Toth Mouritzen: Translating the children’s book to Danish.

Emilia Guerra Silva Sørensen: Kindly translated the homepage to Danish.

Magnus Malling Pedersen: For organising the Ampliqon facility visit, hosting us and showing us around the Ampliqon headquarters.

Collaborations

iGEM Thessaloniki Patras, ULaval and Concordia-Montreal: They kindly invited us to participate in the Rosalind Chronicles.

iGEM Düsseldorf: We participated in their postcard project.

iGEM Gröningen: The Groningen team helped us get protein structure predictions for our modeling team by running our sequences into AlphaFold as they already had experience with it. Besides, they provided very useful feedback for our app that made us improve some bugs and visual effects.

Financial support

DTU Blue Dot

Novo Nordisk Fonden

Ampliqon

IDT

NEB

Knud Højgaards Fond

BioNordika

Eurofins Genomics

New England BioLabs

iGEM Impact Grant

Benchling