Attributions
All work presented in this project, unless otherwise specified, has been carried out, analyzed and reported by the iGEM Stockholm 2021 team. The project would not be possible without the support and guidance that we have received from our supervisors, instructors, advisors and other contributors. On this page we want to deeply thank the people who have contributed to our project and iGEM journey.
Supervisors
Professor Johan Rockberg
Prof. Johan Rockberg is a group leader at the department of Protein Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Besides doing his own research, he is our principal investigator. Alongside providing us with working facilities, he advised us on experimental procedures and general support during our project.
Professor Ute Romling
Prof. Romling's research focuses on microbiology. She is a professor at Karolinska Institutet and our secondary principal investigator. She helped us by providing working space in a BSL2 facility.
Instructors
Marit Moller
Marit is a PhD student at the department of Protein Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and was an iGEM Stockholm team member in 2018. She provided guidance in project development, experimental procedures and helped in troubleshooting sessions.
Malin Jonsson
Malin was part of iGEM Lund in 2017. Currently she is a PhD student at the department of Protein Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. As our instructor she provided us with advice in all steps of the project.
Advisors
Aman Mebrahtu
Aman was a Team member from 2016 and is currently a PhD student at the department of Protein Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He helped us with troubleshooting on multiple fronts, such as with our PCRs and cloning.
Maximilian Karlander
Max is a PhD student at the department of Protein Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and was a member of the 2015 iGEM Stockholm team. In numerous troubleshooting sessions he helped us understand results and experimental errors and guided us by improving our experiments.
Dimitri Van Simaeys MSc, PhD
Dimitri is an expert with SELEX. He helped us write our initial SELEX protocol and advised us during the process of conducting the experiments.
Rasmus Bengtsson
Rasmus is the president of SGEM. He, together with the board members, provided guidance and arranged the recruitment of the team Leaders.
Vilma Lagebro
Vilma is the vice president of SGEM. She, together with the board members, provided guidance and arranged the recruitment of the team Leaders.
Xinhe Xing
Xinhe was a member of iGEM Stockholm 2020 and she helped us through the development of our wiki.
Athina Eleftheraki
Athina was the team leader of iGEM Stockholm 2020. She guided the current team leaders, Intisar and Elsa, throughout the year. She gave some extra tips and tricks on how to lead such a big group of students.
Other Contributors
SGEM
Stockholm Genetically Engineered Machines or SGEM for short is iGEM Stockholm's own alumni group. Members at SGEM held different workshops for our team, shared their knowledge and experience and helped the team get started. They have also arranged a program called the "SGEM Buddy System". This buddy acted as a contact person for questions, big and small, as a motivation booster, or whatever the two in the buddy couple agree on. But usually, it is a person that a team member can send questions to without the risk of being annoying. In this way, Team leaders aimed to spread knowledge from old igemers on to new ones, in a more easily accessible way.
Andrew McDowell MSc, PhD, PgCHEP
Andrew McDowell is a group leader at the Ulster University Belfast. His research interest is in resident human microbiota in health and disease. He has experience in culturing different strains of C. acnes and advised us on the best culture conditions for C. acnes.
Gunaratna Kuttuva Rajarao
Gunaratna Kuttuva Rajarao works at Division of industrial biotechnology at KTH and is course lab responsible. Guna gave us valuable insight into bioremediation during our brainstorming phase and showed us around the lab and held a safety introduction.
Fredrik Blix
Fredrik is associate professor in cyber security and has more than 25 years of experience in this area. He helped us both in setting up our entrepreneurship workshop and by brainstorming for the development of our business plan. Additionally, he has proofread the business plan and parts of our ethics & safety plan.
Ulf Osterstad
In addition to Fredrik's insights, we have had some help from MD Ulf Osterstad. Ulf has a lot of experience in the e-health business. He gave some extra tips and tricks on what to think about when setting up or developing e-health related tools during our entrepreneurship workshop.
Blanka Novak and Erik Hartman
Blanka and Erik are co-founders of Synthethics, a non-profit organization that wants to help, for example, iGEM students and other people engaged in synthetic biology realise the importance of ethics. They helped us organize a workshop for our own team and iGEM Uppsala. They inspired us to include some ethical concerns and questions in our document on safety.
Frida Bjornro
Frida is a dermatologist and MD, and co-founder of Swedish dermatology clinic 'Kirurgiskt hudcenter'. She advised on the direction of our business plan and thus helped us reshape our complete entrepreneurial plan, by shifting the focus from dermatologists to research centres.
Kemeny Lajos and Kornelia Szabo
Prof. and Dermatologist Kemeny Lajos and Dr Kornelia Szabo of the Dermatological Research Group at University Of Szeged were contacted after our contact with Frida Bjornro. These two researchers with a specific focus on skin microbiota were enthusiastic about our business plan and helped us identify our unique selling point, as well as iron out the last doubts we had when it came to the target audience for MIKROSKIN.
Erik Tosterud
Erik is a Business Developer at Drivhuset Uppsala. Drivhuset is a foundation that supports students, freelancers and entrepreneurs in the start-up phase free of charge. Erik held a workshop for both us and iGEM Uppsala on how to pitch a idea for potential sponsors and supporters.
Darko Mitrovic
Darko is a PhD student active in the department of applied physics at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). He has a background in biotechnology and was a member of iGEM Stockholm 2018. When we needed guidance regarding computer simulations, he helped us understand the basics of molecular dynamics and introduced us to the molecular dynamics softwares GROMACS and AmberTools.
Alexander Lyubartsev
Alexander is a professor at Stockholm University at the institution of material and environmental chemistry. He is currently teaching physical chemistry and chemical modelling, whereas his research field is molecular computer simulations. He answered some questions regarding modelling of DNA and force fields' effect on aptamers.
Lauren McKee
Lauren McKee is a Docent in Biotechnology and Researcher in the Division of Glycoscience at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She is the principal investigator for the Stockholm CAZyme group, a team performing research on the structure, synthesis, and enzymology of complex carbohydrates. She helped us in the initial formulation of the project, which at the time included performing sequencing studies on healthy and unhealthy skin and creating a prebiotic.
John Lofblom
Professor Lofblom works at the Department of Protein Science in the CBH school at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The general focus of his group's research is on protein engineering technology and development of methods for directed evolution. John provided us with advice in the brainstorming phase. He, together with our PI Johan Rockberg, provided us with working facilities.
Johan Nilvebrant
Johan is a Researcher in the Division of Protein Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He has a background in working with affibodies and was guiding us during the brainstorming phase. At the time, we were discussing using Affibodies, instead of aptamers for our rapid test: Johan gave us an insight on how to work with them and what targets we could select.
Emma Wincent
Emma Wincent is a senior researcher in Molecular Toxicology at the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Unit of Systems Toxicology at Karolinska Institute (KI). She was our point of contact regarding financial matters at KI and harvested our grant money.
Jessica Gahnstrom
Jessica is a graphical designer and a close friend to Elsa, one of the team leaders. She assisted in the editing phase of the presentation video with illustrations and animations.
Caroline Brendov
Caroline was previously a member of the 2021 iGEM team. She took part during the brainstorming phase and designed the team logo.
Zeynep Cetecioglu Gurol
Zeynep is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at KTH. She is an expert in environmental biotechnology and microbial engineering techniques. During our brainstorming phase we had got a lot of suggestions on project topics and valuable insights from Zeynep.
Photographs
Our team photos were taken by the wonderful Chirag Sagare! You can check out more of his art here or connect with him on LinkedIn