Our primary PIs! Dr. Barrick and Dr. Mishler have advised UT Austin’s iGEM team for 9 years now. They assisted with developing our project idea, troubleshooting in the lab, and directing us toward useful resources. In addition, they led weekly meetings that were essential to the development of our project.
Our iGEM advisor! Matsuri is currently a member of iGEM’s Human Practices team. She assisted us with revising our writing on the Wiki pages and making the most out of our Human Practices experiences. Throughout our project, Matsuri provided helpful feedback on our project and helped us communicate our narrative and research in a clear way.
We would like to thank the following people for helping us with our project. In particular, we would like to thank them for introducing us to many of the basic wet lab procedures we used over the past year:
Dan Deatherage. Barrick Lab safety manager! Dan provided us with lab-specific safety training. He also conducted the nanopore sequencing required to confirm the sequences of our antibiotic resistance detectors. For this experiment, we gave him overnight cultures of our biosensors, which he then prepped, sequenced, and analyzed for us.
Isaac Gifford. Barrick Lab mentor! Isaac guided us with transformation, plating, Golden Gate, and PCR protocols. He was always available to help in lab, whether it be for troubleshooting faulty equipment or double-checking our primer designs.
Cameron Roots. Barrick Lab mentor! Cameron answered our questions and guided our team with general lab procedures. He also gave us marionette strains.
Matt McGuffie. Barrick Lab mentor! Matt provided us DH5 alpha cells for the Interlab experiments and gave us pointers on how to perform a BLAST search to determine our P. destructans target sequence.
Emmanuel Chavarria. Barrick Lab manager! Emmanuel helped us with logistical tasks like getting keys to the lab. He kept the laboratory running smoothly and provided general lab assistance daily.
Other Barrick Lab and Microbe Hackers members. They proofread parts of our Wiki and maintained the labspace with us.
Dr. Nate Fuller. Ecophysiologist and bat expert from Texas Parks and Wildlife
Jennifer Smith-Castro. Recovery biologist from U. S. Fish and Wildlife Services
Dr. Jeffrey Foster. P. destructans researcher from Northern Arizona University
Together, these experts provided us with information on the local bat population and why they are an important animal to protect. They also shared their first-hand accounts of what it is like to detect White Nose Syndrome, highlighting the importance and pros and cons of developing a more novel and efficient detection method.
Dr. Bradley Biggs. ADP1 researcher from Berkeley National Laboratory, focused on developing ADP1 as a chassis
Dr. Robert Cooper. ADP1 researcher from Marquette University currently focused on using ADP1 as a biosensor for detecting cancer
Collectively, Dr. Biggs and Dr. Cooper offered sound advice about how to engineer an effective biosensor using ADP1 as a chassis. As scientists who have worked with ADP1 extensively in the past, their insights helped us refine our detector.
Dr. Barrick and Dr. Mishler lead a synthetic biology course, BIO 237, at our university. This course is tailored to preliminary research and brainstorming ideas for iGEM. The course began during the Spring semester of 2022, and our team began brainstorming project ideas in March. As a part of the course, wet-lab safety training occurred in April. By mid-May, most iGEM team members were familiar with basic wet lab technique, such as PCR and transforming ADP1.
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The repository used to create this website is available at gitlab.igem.org/2022/austin-utexas.