Team:Hong Kong HKU/Attributions

Attributions

iGEM HKU

  • Team leaders: Sabrina Lerskiatiphanich, Jo Yi Chow

  • Wet Lab: Kailee Poon, William Chen, Devin Wan, Betty Choi, Wang Han, Jake Tam, Seungyeon Lee, Valerie Kwan

  • Dry Lab: Sum Lau, Brianna Gautama

  • Science Communication: Isabella Kroon, Sunanas Utsha, Erica Widjaja, Alisha Chun, Minnie Chick


    • Principal Investigator

    • Prof. Celia Schunter for providing continuous constructive feedback on our project and connecting us with her network. Thank you for your creative problem-solving and helping us to structure our ideas

    Advisors

    • Kenneth Ng for constantly stressing us out and pushing us to become better independent researchers. His frustration motivated us to do better (at identifying contaminated reagents, not necessarily at being less careless). He also ran a cyanobacteria daycare for when we proved to be incapable parents. Occasionally he took pity on us and agreed to be involved in work he really shouldn’t have been doing (thank you for being a speaker at HKUiPCC)

    • Munisa Tabarova for giving us a lab crash course and guiding us through plasmid design, connecting us with lab staff, and offering constructive feedback throughout our project

    • Chris Ng for his guidance in mathematical modelling, providing us with advice on how to make improvements

    • Betty Au-Yeung for her support in the early stages of project brainstorming

    Lab Support

    • Ms Helen Leung for lending us lab equipment, helping us with booking lab space, and helping us navigate the university administration system. Thank you for entertaining our many sporadic requests via email, which we send at nearly any time of the day

    • Ms Lily Ng for helping us secure and book lab space. We can only aspire to reach to her levels of patience as she receives yet another email from us about our lab issues

    • Prof Zeng and Ms Kim Li for generously providing us with the PCC 7942 strain

    • iGEM SSC for exchanging cyanobacteria strain of UTEX 2973 with our PCC 7942

    • iGEM CityU for giving us PETase Plasmid, saving us valuable time

    • Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing (InnoWing) for securing a lab space for future iGEM HKU team members

    • Prof. Zhai and 4N-01 lab members for letting us work during October weekends in your lab

    • Prof. Masayo Kotaka who identified areas we had not thought through in our experimental design, prompting us to conduct additional research and refine our design, saving us time

    • Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT) for providing us with free gene fragments

    • Twist Bioscience for providing us with free gene fragments

    • SnapGene for providing the team with free SnapGene licences

    Fundraising

    • iGEM Foundation for awarding us with the Impact Grant

    • Prof. John Kao for entrepreneurship advice

    • Prof. Chui Chun Kit and Prof. George Tham for their keen interest and support in our project, making us aware of funding opportunities and guiding us through the InnoWing application process

    • John Huen for providing us with the opportunity to create and teach classes at Koding Kingdom

    Human Practice Support

    • Prof. Jiandong Huang for making us aware of the limited synbio guidelines in Hong Kong, inspiring HKUiPCC. We additionally thank him for offering constructive feedback on our experimental design, especially on the co-culturing of our bacteria

    • iGEM TAU for organising the ASYV collaboration with iGEM TU Delft, iGEM MTU, iGEM Vilnius

    • iGEM HKUST for organising and inviting us to the HK iGEM Symposium

    • The Mills Fabrica for being a key supporter of our policy competition (HKUiPCC), providing us with speakers and our participants with prizes. Thank you for being so enthusiastic about our project and agreeing to share your research about synbio policy with us, as well as directing us to potential funding opportunities

    • Mr James Chang for being a speaker and judge for HKUiPCC

    • Ms Jenna Chow for being a speaker and judge for HKUiPCC

    • Dr Felicity Kelpier for being a speaker and judge for HKUiPCC

    • Mr Wayne Wong for being a speaker and judge for HKUiPCC

    • Prof. Timothy Bonebrake for being a speaker for HKUiPCCiPCC

    • Mr Stan Shea for being a speaker for HKUiPCC

    • Mr Gagandeep Singh for being a speaker for HKU

    • Ms Sneha Suresh for being a judge for HKUiPCC

    • Lung Fu Shan Environmental Education Center for contributing prizes to HKUiPCC

    • The University of Hong Kong’s Science Faculty for contributing prizes to HKUiPCC

    Additional Support

    • Timothy Ng for his expertise in mechanical engineering, helping us with our container / hardware design and mathematical modelling. He conducted literature review for our project and developed equations vital to our model. Both our hardware and math modelling components would not have been possible without him

    • Aashana Shah and Saharsh Khicha for their contribution to our Koding Kingdom project and brainstorming during the early stages of our wiki design. Specifically, Aashana created a short Python exercise for the beginner's Koding Kingdom course, while Saharsh created materials for both the junior and senior course. Both of them also assisted in our literature review to find relevant figures for our model

    • Pavneet Kaur, Mia Bayezid, and Tridib Kumar who sadly withdrew from our team, but provided support in the preliminary stages of planning. In particular, we thank Pavneet for her assistance in executing logistics of HKUiPCC, Mia for his research that helped us in the early stages of mathematical modelling, and Tridib for his insights on wiki building