Evry-Saclay 2021 iGEM team website

Attributions

& Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment

The 2021 iGEM Evry Paris-Saclay team is composed of Master's and Bachelor's students, but the project would not have been possible without the help of many other people whom we wanted to thank.

Host institutions

The Lab of Systems and Synthetic Biology (iSSB), which is part of the UMR8030 Genomics Metabolics directed by Patrick Wincker, welcomed us. Jean-Loup Faulon kindly allowed us to perform most of our experiments in his laboratory. We would like to thank the researchers for their accessibility and kindness, as well as for their help when we needed it, in particular Laurent Jannière for the loan of his laboratory instruments and for his expertise in microbiology and Sylvie Bobelet, who constantly lent us a hand, even in the most difficult moments. We also have special thoughts for our neighbour Valérie Da Silva who made sure that our project was carried out in the best possible conditions.

We thank Genopole, University of Evry and the Paris-Saclay University for providing the main financial support.

Material support

New England Biolabs (NEB) kindly supplied enzymes and kits for our molecular biology experiments.

SnapGene supplied free licences of its software for molecular biology which was essential for the design of our project.

IDT and Twist Bioscience offered DNA synthesis.

Special thanks

A special thanks to Ioana Popescu, who has encouraged the creation of our team and who has been there at every step of the project. In addition to being a supervisor she also provided help and emotional support to us. She supported our team leader in all the administrative tasks. The success of this project is largely due to her.

Special thanks to Manish Kushwaha too for his continuous help during the design and modelling steps of the project and for his enriching participation in the French meet-up workshop for us and the other teams. His knowledge of synthetic biology and computer science has been a real help for the team.

We thank Anna Niaraki who has helped us with the bioinformatics analyses as well as bibliographic research. We would like to thank Esteban Lebrun who was there all along for our project, to advise when designing and to help us improve our wiki.

We would like to thank Dr. Luis Ángel Fernández, Doctor of Molecular Biology at Departamento de Biología Molecular, who was the first person to support and approve our project.

We would also like to thank Dr. Beatriz Alvarez Gonzales, senior postdoctoral researcher at the Centro Nacional de Biotecnología (CNB-CSIC), and her team, who sent us their plasmid and modified hosts.

Distribution of the tasks

George Sainte-Rose, our versatile team leader, who initiated the team and took care of the recruitment of its members. He also managed the administrative part of the project (financial aspects, finding sponsors and ordering materials) with the help of our Treasurer Benjamin Felsemberg. He carefully coordinated the different parts of the team to allow the project to progress smoothly. He also participated in the dry lab activities by working on the design of the plasmids. In addition, he contributed to the work of Human Practices by establishing contacts with professionals and going out to meet them. He’s also our web designer.

Wet lab

Doriane Blaise, co-leader responsible for everything in the wet-lab performed most of the experiments. Anthony Pragassam, Benjamin Felsemberg, Adrien Thomas, Hugo Lenoir and Loay Hussein were her right hands in building all the plasmids, transforming and growing bacteria.

Human Practices

Adrien Thomas spent several weeks working on the Bio puzzle application. A fun and educational application that allows people who are not familiar with synthetic biology to understand the mechanisms used in the laboratory. He also exchanged with many professionals with different fields of expertise and lent his voice to the presentation of our project, making it clear to understand.

Kamyar Keshavarz-Farajkhah and Macha Dussouchaud contributed to the public engagement project "tl;dr" through publications on Instagram. "tl;dr" allows people interested in biology to read scientific publications in a much simpler format.

Macha Dussouchaud was responsible for communication. She participated in the organisation of the meet-up event.

Macha Dussouchaud and Fatou Keïta researched our project from a bioethical point of view and also provided information on the field of sustainable development through bibliographic research.

Fatou Keïta took part in the Cites des sciences event and passed on her passion for biology to many families during the on-site experiments. Thanks to Fatou Keïta, we will keep good memories of this day, as she’s a talented photographer.

Benjamin Felsemberg, Anthony Pragassam, Doriane Blaise, with the help of Sylvie Bobelet, produced a pocket-sized card to promote the launch of the Bio puzzle application. The distribution of the card significantly increased the number of downloads.

Modeling and Wiki

Adrien Thomas, Rafael Montenegro, Kamyar Keshavarz-Farajkhah and Georges Sainte-Rose designed all our plasmids and worked on the mechanism of our biological tool.

Adrien Thomas took care of the NGS sequencing analysis and building the model.

Georges Sainte-Rose was our web designer. He devoted part of his time to creating our team website. He also passed on his knowledge to introduce the other members to HTML.

Video

Adrien Thomas edited the video promotion and also recorded the text with the help of Loïc Blaise, photographer & videographer.

Brainstorming

All the members have been involved in the brainstorming to find an interesting project. Additionally, Vincent Louis and Reem Hamed participated in the project at the beginning, but had to leave it before its completion. We thank them for their time.

Team:Evry Paris-Saclay/Attributions