Team:IISER-Tirupati India/Attributions
The IISER Tirupati iGEM 2021 team would like to acknowledge the contributions of all those who helped us in our project with help and support in whichever way possible. Without their help, we would not have been able to take a step towards the actualisation of our project.
Principal Investigators
We are grateful to Dr Raju Mukherjee, Prof G Ambika and Prof B J Rao for being our mentors. Your invaluable guidance helped us along each step of our journey.
Expert Advisors
The faculties at our institute have been guiding us throughout our journey with their expertise in different fields. Thank you,
- Prof K N Ganesh for your invaluable advice for improving our project and helping us with resources to actualise our project.
- Dr Vijayalakshmi V Subramanian, for your expert advice on cloning and protein expression in yeast, along with your constant support with project development and experimental protocols. We are thankful to receive the plasmids, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains from your lab.
- Dr Nibedita Pal and Dr Hussain Bhukya, for your valuable advice and constant support in protein modelling. Your encouragement for going beyond literature and exploring new possibilities helped us learn several new domains in this journey.
- Dr Tapan Chandra Adhyapak and Dr Dileep Mampallil for your valuable guidance in modelling of the delivery of GMO, the first module of our project.
- Dr Annapurna Devi Allu, for your constant support and guidance during our brainstorming sessions, encouraging us to take up challenges and think out of the pot (for our ideas based on plants).
- Dr Ramkumar Sambasivan, for your invaluable advice on progesterone sensing during our brainstorming sessions which gave us a new path to explore for regulation of our design.
- Dr Swarup Roy Choudhury, for your advice on experimental protocols of yeast and for providing us with the required resources to conduct our experiments.
- Dr Ashwani Sharma, for your advice on vesicles and fluorescent proteins and providing us with the required resources to conduct our experiments.
- Dr Sreenivas Chavali, for your advice on protein structure and modelling during our brainstorming sessions.
- Dr Suchi Goel, for your invaluable advice during our brainstorming sessions and for providing resources for our experiments.
- Dr Sanjay Kumar, for your advice during our brainstorming sessions and providing us resources to develop our idea on cancer-nanobots during brainstorming sessions.
- Dr Eswarayya Ramireddy, for your advice during our brainstorming sessions for guiding us to develop our idea on a plant synthetic biology project.
- Prof K Vijayamohanan Pillai, for your advice during our brainstorming sessions for guiding us to develop our idea (for our idea to develop cancer-nanobots).
Student Advisors
Our team was in constant communication with some of the iGEM Alumni and some amazing science enthusiasts of IISER Tirupati, whose guidance and motivation helped us immensely throughout the iGEM journey. Thank you,
Bhabesh Kumar Tripathy, for your round-the-clock help and extensive contribution in shaping the project in every aspect. You are the mentor, aka advisor, that we officially couldn’t acknowledge, but we are grateful for your right pieces of advice. We are thankful for your infinite patience and to provide us with the possibility to ask and discuss questions at any time of the day. Your constant encouragement helped us stay motivated throughout our journey.
Amogh Desai, for your persistent help and guidance with mathematical and protein modelling. We are thankful to you for providing us with invaluable resources and endless patience while we were learning different synthetic biology tools. We also appreciate your support and active participation in conducting the workshop with Agastya Foundation.
Ved Mahajan, for your unwavering help and guidance with fixing bugs in mathematical modelling.
Dibya Saha for your constant guidance and help throughout the project. We thank you profusely for helping us understand various genders and the problems with current contraceptives with respect to the trans and intersex spectrum of individuals. Your persistent encouragement and motivation at every step boosted our confidence. We shall definitely make iGEM memes and stickers collection for you.
Shubhrika Jain, for your continuous support and guidance throughout the crucial period of our project. Your motivating words helped us find a way out of odd situations and your first-hand experience with virtual iGEM was a blessing.
Arya George, for your constant support and guidance throughout our iGEM journey for understanding several concepts of cloning and protein production in yeast and experimental protocols.
R Raajalakshmi, for your constant help and guidance with mathematical modelling.
Amartya Pal, for your help and support in experimental design for protein purification and immunoblot.
Sanskar Agrawal, for your support during the development of our project and making our survey more inclusive, and for making us aware of more stakeholders.
Deevitha, for your assistance in the approach towards our mathematical modelling problem.
Mrugank Dake, Tejas Vandeo Borkar and Uddeshya Pandey for your support and guidance in the iGEM journey.
Purva Naik, for your help and encouragement while initializing the journey of human practices of our project.
Support for project development
We were connected with several people who supported us for holistic development and representation of our project. Thank you,
We are thankful to Dr Gagandeep Gahley, Assistant Professor, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar and her PhD student Ms Neha helped us troubleshoot our experiments and provided us with an additional set of ZP2 clones for our experiments. Dr Gahley’s research on ZP2 has been a major source of our literature survey which helped us through and through to refine our idea.
We are highly obliged to Dr Manjula Reddy, Chief Scientist at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, India who directed us to the correct path to contact Dr Sabari, IISER Thiruvananthapuram when we sought help for our experimental design of Bacillus subtilis.
Agrima Sawhney and Mohit Kumar Pradhan, for your kind help in actualising our vision of Lab Eyes to make our labs more accessible.
Dr Swarup Sarkar for your persistent help and support for our project.
Ms Tanya Agrawal, for your help and support in the Indian Sign Language Translation of words.
Ms Apurupa Vatsalya for providing us contacts for connecting us with several stakeholders and experts who helped us make our project more inclusive.
Members of IISER Tirupati’s Prakriti Club who helped us organise the event on World Environment Day.
Anita Banerjee, R Raajalakshmi, Lakshmi Veda Samhitha Peesapati, Vandana Rajesh Umbarkar, Sanskar Agrawal, Rakhee Rane, Pournima Bhangale, Akanksha Khurd, Mohan Angothu, Venkata Subbarao, Kruthika Avadhani, Mini K, Haseena P H, Kalpita Tripathy, Bhabesh Kumar Tripathy and Snehalata Pati for helping us prepare a unique stop-motion promo video for our project.
iGEM Ambassadors Shruti Sridhar, Shrestha Rath and Soumodeep Sarkar for your constant help and support throughout our iGEM journey.
Malavika Rajesh, Gayathri Satheesh, Aparna C, Annal Baisil, Athmika Prajesh, Megha M and Sreelakshmi T N for helping us with our social media outreach activities during Sexual Health Week.
The well-wishers from the LGBTQIA+ community who helped us unlearn the gender binary while understanding how to make our project more inclusive and make ourselves aware of the right things.
Our family members and friends who participated in our In-Depth Interviews and helped us to understand the perspective of stakeholders.
The following artists who joined in 'The Birds and the Bees: The virtual Art Exhibition' us for spreading the word about the consequences of unplanned pregnancy on the World Contraception Day through their Art:- Aditi Bhakat, Aiman Kafeel, Richa Vaidya, Srujana K, Vaishnavi Varadaraja
Wetlab Support
The pandemic placed a constraint on our access to the lab to carry out our experiments, however, the time that we spent in the lab was enriched with an enormous learning experience and cherishable memories because of the guidance and support of several Teaching Assistants, iPhD and PhD students who helped us throughout. Thank you,
Anup Chandra Pal M, Mohan Mukesh Malviya, M Purushottam and Tharachand for their constants help and support in providing us with resources for our experiments and guiding us throughout the process.
Members of Prof B J Rao’s Lab, Anupama Shirke, Bajaj Mayur Manoj, Gunjan and Komal Raina, for your immense guidance and support in conducting our experiments from our baby steps with preparing plates to purifying our desired proteins. We are grateful for your help during all our late-night experiments and your patience with our numerous questions.
Members of Dr Sanjay Kumar’s Lab, Rahail Ashraf and Ravi Chandra for guiding us with our experiments, handling instruments and providing us with required materials whenever required at the 11th hour!
Members of Dr Vasudharani Devanathan’s Lab, Arulventhan M and Sapana Sharma for helping us with handling instruments and performing experiments. We are thankful for your support in providing us with resources for conducting our experiments.
Members of Dr Suchi Goel’s Lab, Adrita Das, Bijayeeta Deb, Shukla Madhavi Sanjay and Neelima K for your persistent support and guidance throughout, we are also thankful to receive resources for our experiments from your lab. Our quick-query sessions were extremely important during the experiments. Our hearty thanks to Adrita and Bijayeeta for helping us with fluorescence imaging for our experiments.
Members of Dr P Suresh Babu’s Lab, Namita Chutani and Himanshu for helping us with resources for conducting our experiments.
Members of Dr Swarup Roy Choudhury’s Lab, Raju Kuiry, Jismon Jose and Dr Bhagath Kumar Palaka for helping us with our experiments for cloning and affinity purification, we are grateful to receive your help with resources to conduct our experiments.
Members of Dr Raju Mukherjee’s Lab, Akanksha Agrawal, Lodhiya Tejan Harsukhbhai and Saniya Patil for helping us with our experiments, teaching us how to operate instruments and answering our queries multiple times throughout the journey. Especially, Akanksha Agrawal for helping us with fluorescence microscopy.
Abin P George from Dr Ramireddy Eswarayya's lab, for helping us take the baby steps of acclimatizing in the lab and helping us with experimental techniques and operating instruments.
A Murali Krishna from Dr Ashwani Sharma’s Lab, Pemmiraju Harish, Dona Maria Joseph from Dr Rajesh Vishwanathan’s Lab, Sivakumar G from Dr Gopinath Purushothaman’s Lab, Sonia M from Dr Jatish Kumar’s Lab, Kathan from Dr Ramkumar Sambasivan’s Lab and Geethika from Dr Soumit Sankar Mandal’s Lab for helping us with resources throughout our experiments.
We thank all the PhD students and Ms Leelawati for helping us set up the autoclave every day!
We are also thankful to all the guards and wardens who woke up in the middle of the night or early mornings to ensure that we reached our rooms or labs safely.
Consults
We received persistent help from Dr Piyush Chaudhary, Postdoctoral fellow at National Institute of Immunology who provided us with the ZP2 clones on behalf of Prof Satish Gupta and helped us troubleshoot our experiments with the clone.
We are thankful to Malhar Atre, PhD student, from Dr Sabari’s lab who helped us troubleshoot our experiments with Bacillus subtilis.
We are grateful to receive consistent help from Ayushi Hota, Dr Adyasha Mishra and Dr Ruchi Mishra from Maharaja Krishna Chandra Gajapati Medical College & Hospital, Odisha and Jihan Mohamad Iqbal from JIPMER, Pondicherry to understand the details of female reproductive system anatomy from the perspective of students and experts in medicine.
Events
Mrs Kadambari Lohiya, for facilitating us with an opportunity through the programme "STEM power for DoE girls" and our gratitude to Mr BP Pandey and Mr Shailendra Sharma for permitting us to conduct an informative workshop, Gene Gala, and all other teachers present throughout the sessions we conducted in collaboration with the iGEM 2021 Team of IISER Kolkata.
We would like to thank the iGEM Team of IISER Kolkata for an amazing collaboration in organizing the event, Gene Gala: a 5-day mini-summer school on synthetic biology and its applications for female high school students. Their team prepared beautiful interactive slides for the 5-day presentation slides with relevant suggestions from our team members. We had lots of fun designing the activities for the students together and teaching the bright minds throughout the 5 days. We prepared day-wise handbooks, quizzes, and the workshop plan document for reference of each day’s content with relevant suggestions from the team of IISER Kolkata.
Team Work
OviCloak wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of each and every member of the team. We would like to elaborate on how we divided the work throughout the iGEM journey.
Shreyas Samir Parkhie
Co-Team Leader | Wetlab | Human Practices and Outreach | Finances | Collaborations | Partnerships
Komal Pati
Co-Team Leader | Wetlab | Protein Modelling | Design | Collaborations | Partnerships
Akshay Babasaheb Tawale
Wetlab
Ankush Kaushik
Wiki | Mathematical Modelling
Ashwin Pillai
Mathematical Modelling | Wiki
Ashwin Sharma
Wetlab | Wiki
Athira Anil
Wetlab
Rajeshree Rajesh Umbarkar
Wetlab
Fathima Aslaha Theruvath Rasheed
Wetlab | Human Practices and Outreach | Design | Collaborations
Lochan Ravindra Chaudhari
Mathematical Modelling | Design | Collaborations
Md Adil Aman
Mathematical Modelling | Wiki
Niloufer Shanavas
Human Practices and Outreach | Finances | Collaborations
Prameya Garge
Wetlab | Protein Modelling | Collaborations
Shivam Kumar
Mathematical Modelling | Design | Wiki
Shubhra Singhal
Wetlab | Human Practices and Outreach | Collaborations | Wiki
We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who contributed to our fundraiser and helped us actualise our project in this iGEM journey.
We sincerely thank IISER Tirupati for providing us with necessary funding and infrastructure. Additionally, we are grateful to Genscript for providing us with the generous sponsorship, Twist Biosciences, IDT, Geneious, Bros Scientific, India Scientific, Benchling and NEB for supporting us by providing necessary materials required for our experiments. We would like to thank Invideo for helping us with technical support with a premium sponsorship for creating our deliverables. We would also like to acknowledge BioRender.com for templates for images of protein structures and components of genetic circuit diagrams.
Special Thanks
We are grateful to have received timely help and support from our friend and mentor, the late Omkar Mohapatra, iGEM Alumni. He was a great source of inspiration and motivated us for our iGEM Journey.
Our Sponsors
