Team members
Name |
Project Part |
Task description |
|---|---|---|
Jana Naef |
AFP |
Jana is this year’s team captain. She was in charge of the design, expression and purification of the AFP portion of our project and successfully managed to produce AFP solutions. Furthermore, she discussed GMOs with experts in the context of our podcast collaboration with the EPFL iGEM team. She wrote an article for our blog and translated the articles into German. She also held an interview for our Human practices research. |
Tiphaine Lainey |
AFP, Human Practices |
Tiphaine is our team's vice-captain and human practices officer. She assisted Jana in the purification of antifreeze proteins. She wrote the script and did the voiceover for our promotional and presentation videos. She planned and organized the educational weekend. Tiphaine proofread wiki texts, the articles published on our blog, wrote an article and translated the articles into French. She also held an interview for our Human practices research. |
Quillan Favey |
Assays |
Quillan is the webmaster and the engineer and creator of FROZONE. He produced all the software and hardware to perform the assays. Together with Julien, he carried out all these assays. He also made the model used to determine the TH of our AFPs at higher concentrations. He was in charge of the wiki design. He also filmed the promotional video and composed its soundtrack. |
Julien Dubois |
Assays |
Julien is the communication manager of our team and was in charge of our social media. He filmed and edited the promotional and presentation videos. Subsequently, he worked on the frost treatment assay and the thermal hysteresis assays using FROZONE. He analyzed the data gathered during all the assays. He also participated in the production of the podcast with the EPFL iGEM team. |
Mattia Gobbetti |
Phages |
Mattia was a laboratory manager. He was in charge of the phages subproject and performed all the design and lab work for this section. He was also in charge of the biosafety part of the project. |
Joaquim Barmaz |
Tailocins |
Joaquim was a laboratory manager. As for lab work, he was in charge of the tailocins’ part of the project. He planned and performed the experiments for this subsection. He also wrote an article on the blog and helped with the lab work during the educational weekend. He held an interview for our Human practices research. |
Cyntia Lukala |
Tailocins |
Cyntia was our iGEM team’s secretary. She performed many of the tailocins experiments and helped to design the parts for this subproject. She arranged the electron microscope experiment to make expressed tailocins visible for us to detect. |
Carla Andrade |
Tailocins |
Carla was the treasurer and sponsor manager of the team. She helped greatly on the tailocins’ subproject and helped design the parts necessary for the experiments. She also wrote an article for the blog. |
Pablo Mavrocordatos |
Wiki |
Pablo was in charge of the wiki design. He also helped with the lab work in various subsections of the project. |
Jeronimo Camelo |
Human Practices |
Jeronimo was a human practices officer. He held an interview for our Human practices research. He took part in the design of the podcast on GMOs with the EPFL iGEM team. He took part in the phages subproject. He helped to set-up the educational weekend. |
Primary PI
Yolanda Schaerli
Yolanda Schaerli initiated the creation of the UNILausanne team and found the funding for the team. She gave our team classes to teach us all the basics of synthetic biology. Moreover, she was an enormous help and support for the team and met with us each week to guide us throughout the competition. We are forever thankful to her for giving us this marvellous opportunity.
Instructors
Audam Chhun
Audam went above and beyond the call of duty to help our team. At the beginning of the project, he held a marvelous week-long synthetic biology bootcamp for us and got all our members up to date on the lab methods necessary to carry out our iGEM project. He helped us tremendously throughout the entire competition and on every sub-section of the project. He also supervised a day of the educational weekend we held and reviewed many of our wiki texts. Our team calls Audam the iGEM Superhero, but this nickname does not even begin to convey the gratefulness we feel towards his immense contributions.
Linh Ho
Linh imparted all her glorious iGEM wisdom to us throughout the competition and was always available to give us incredible and much needed advice. She also generously supervised a full day of our educational weekend. Coming up to the wiki freeze, she was of tremendous support - she reviewed our mounds of texts, helped organize our to-do lists and priorities, and kindly made us some much needed coffee and baked goods! She even stayed with us throughout the afternoon and evening of the wiki-freeze to continue editing our texts. We are immensely grateful for the help and support she provided.
Roberto Avendano Vega
Roberto thoroughly coached the members of our team working on AFPs. He accompanied this part of the project throughout the competition, from its design and execution to the correction of all the texts related to it. His help allowed us to build strong foundations for the AFP project, leading to their successful production.
Sudip Das
Sudip helped us extract our Pseudomonas bacteria’s genomic DNA and assisted the members of our team in charge of the tailocin project in their lab work. He also helped in the manipulation of this bacteria’s genomic sequence.
Dimitra Synefiaridou
Dimitra gave us advice on our project design. She also ordered all the materials necessary to run our lab, which was a huge help.
Project Advisor
Michael Taschner
Michael Taschner helped tremendously in the AFP expression and purification process. He provided the advice and materials necessary to obtain our AFP solutions and kindly demonstrated the methods new to the team members in charge of this part of the project. He selflessly gave his time to our team, although he had no previous engagement to do so. He even lent us space in his lab to perform the purification of our proteins. We are deeply grateful to Michael Taschner for his assistance, which was invaluable and a tremendous catalyst for our success in the AFP portion of our project.
Jordan Vacheron & Clara Heiman
Jordan Vacheron and Clara Heiman contributed greatly to the success of the tailocin part of the project. Jordan gave us plenty of advice regarding our work with tailocins and provided us with protocols for their extraction as well as for the transformation of Pseudomonas syringae. He and Clara also supervised us in the lab during the tailocins extraction and the overlay assay. Their help lead to the successful production of tailocins, the most significant success in this part of the project.
Nicholay Diaz Ardila & Hang Zhang
Nicholay Diaz Ardilla helped us design and perform our frost damage assay on Arabidopsis thaliana. He taught us how to work with A. thaliana, from plating and staining to visualizing the leaves under the microscope. He also helped us celebrate our success over marvelous Colombian coffee and a nice beer. When Nicholay was unavailable, Hang was always present to generously help us with our assays.
Hugues Favey
Hugues dedicated a substantial amount of his weekends discussing, advising and helping out Quillan with some of the more technical aspects of the project, such as the FROZONE design and software. He also provided us with all the necessary power supplies, light source and other hardware supplies. He also generously granted us access to a laser cutter so we could cut out our parts as well as thermal chambers so we could conduct our assays, that are in his lab. Besides all the help, he provided emotional, food support, and computer support when his son's computer died with lots of the project's content trapped inside. For this, we thank him with all of our heart.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the people who helped us during this project.
- The Korea Polar Research Institute kindly provided us the pCold-I-FfIBP construct.
- Christoph Keel provided us with lots of background information and references on Pseudomonas syringae.
- Jean Daraspe helped us with the electron microscopy, making it possible to obtain pictures of our tailocins.
- Gregory Resch helped us with the design of the phage part of our project and provided us with useful insights.
- Vincent de Bakker helped with the design of the phage part of the project by providing an algorithm to select the best sgRNA to target the InaZ gene.
- Hadiastri Kusumawardhani provided us with advice regarding the work with phagemids and gave us general support for lab work.
- Içvara Barbier helped us with the brainstorming.
- Christian Hardtke helped us identify the best protocol to assess frost damage on our plants and provided us with the lab space to perform our assays.
- Serge Pelet helped us choose the right microscope for FROZONE.
- Danilo Christen shared his knowledge about crop frost damage and about the current way of preventing it.
- Simon Gasser provided useful information regarding the homologation process of our product.
- Silvain Aubrey and Anne Gabrielle Wüst Saucy gave us detailed information about the Swiss legislation and how it would affect the implementation of our project.
- Denis Duboule, Anne Gabrielle Wüst Saucy, Christian Fankhauser and Valérie Kottman kindly agreed to take part in our podcast and to answer our questions.
- We collaborated with Séverine Trouilloud and Mathilde Ythier from the Eprouvette who kindly helped us organise our educational weekend.
- Fréquence Banane lent us their recording studio for the podcast.
- Jordi Pla, our mentor, helped us with the modeling of the tailocins and gave us useful insights on the modeling part of our project.
- Didier Gertsch lent us cameras for our promotion video.
- Adrien Barmaz helped adding our texts and figures on the wiki.
- Estelle Pignon provided us with some help and advice in the lab.
- Jan-Willem Veening provided helpful tips for the project.
- The School of biology supported our iGEM participation and gave us credits for it. It also provided us the labs and meeting rooms.
- The Department of Microbiology at the University of Lausanne provided us with media and consumables and let us use their instruments. It also supported us in accounting.
Sponsors
University of Lausanne, Faculty of Biology and Medicine
Fondation Leenaards
Genscript Biotech Corporation
Promega
New England Biolabs
Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc.
Microsynth AG
Twist Bioscience