Who did what?
Our project started around December of
2021, Jan and Han (Our PI’s) called out during their lectures that they were looking for people interested in participating
in iGEM, and that they would host a teams call with all of the interested students. During this teams call every
student pitched a project that they were interested in completing, and Jonas and Wael decided to pitch the hard water
project, a few sessions later, around March, we had formulated a plan of attack and went full steam ahead with all the
necessary preparations for the lab work.
Attributions in our team
are a bit complicated since we’re only 7 people it’s a bit of an everyone helps with everything everywhere
situation. That being said, we have some distinct tasks within our team for which everyone is responsible and
especially, we have some people that are not on the set team that have helped us along really well, which we
definitely want to take the time to thank on this page. A first set of people we want to thank are our satellite members,
a group of people that we were always able to call when we needed an extra set of hands.
Our lab supervisors: Mike and Inge
lab support, general support difficult technique support
Mike Sleutel and Inge Van Molle joined our team in July when we started with
the wetlab part and have been a crucial part of our project ever since. They’ve
not only supported us throughout all of the lab work, they’ve also greatly helped
in thinking through some aspects of our project and have always challenged us to
think more critically about our ideas, findings and the literature we found.
We could not have imagined completing this project without their unwavering
support through the many difficult techniques they taught us.
Everyone that works on the third floor labs at the VUB
For letting us haunt your labs for a couple of months, and for being patient with all of our mistakes.
Our scientific advisors (/PI’s) : Jan and Han
project support and advice, fundraising help and advice, project advisor support, presentation coaching,
human practices support
Han and Jan (or Han Remaut and Jan Steyaert) were, next to a duo with comically well-matched names, much more
to our project than just what their titles of scientific advisor suggest. They have sat through countless meetings,
panicked teams calls and millions of ridiculous ideas (or as they would call them: probably not feasible ideas) to
help us shape our project. Next to that they helped advice our fundraising goals, listened to our presentations
about a dozen times and have really put their DNA in our project. We are forever grateful to have had the guidance
of this pair.
Brajabandhu Pradhan
For spending many, many hours in the TEM room with Vita and helping us take some really cool pictures of our protein.
And for that matter: for all his amazing contributions to the knowledge on ENA.
Timur Seitomanov: our website builder
Wiki support
We wanted to give special thanks to Timur Seitomanov. Not only the best website builder we know, but also ever
enthusiastic to learn more about synthetic biology. Thank you Timur for always listening to our crazy ideas and
somehow making them a (virtual) reality.
Stijn Vertommen: our graphic designer and illustrator
Graphical support
Although he never officially even agreed to becoming a satellite member (we basically forced him to illustrate everything
for us). Stijn Vertommen was a true champion about making us the things that we could see but that we could never draw.
Thanks Stijn for never flinching on any of our weird requests (“hey Stijn do you think you could draw an egg being
cracked in about 10 different ways” was one of our phone calls), or just listening when we gave feedback that involved
“making chickens a little more scientific”. Special thanks go to Stijn for illustrating our childrens book and making
our logo.
Wim Jonckheere
Lab manager
In each lab there is a lab manager who makes sure that everyone can perform his research without having to worry about
ordering things. In this way, Wim makes everyone’s life in the lab easier. We would like to thank him for ordering all
the materials we needed, for explaining us how to use large autoclaves, ultracentrifuges… and providing
us a list of his contacts at different companies.
And last but not least, we want to thank our university. It is due to the educational program ‘biological engineering’
at the free university of Brussels that we were introduced to this project, that we learned so much about the natural
world and that we were motivated to take on a task like this. Although there were no particular “synthetic biology”
exclusive courses, the program we followed carefully introduced synthetic biology in many different courses, allowing
us to see the full width of the spectrum that could be reached through this technology.
Finally: let’s get to the student team member attributions. Our two student leaders are Jonas Noé and Vita Cooman.
Jonas is more of a ‘general manager’ and helps keep a bit of order in our chaos (& gives us the necessary reminders
on deadlines). Vita is more of the ‘lab organiser’ and tries to make sure that we get the experiments we need done.
During the project everyone spent some time in the lab and took upon him/herself some extra projects. These projects
are listed here:
Marie Vandijck: Project promotion video
Wael el Yazidi Mouloud: Various education activities & modeling
Lander Goes: Integrated human practices & legalities
Vita Cooman: Finance, graphics & Bert the good bacteria
Jonas Noé: Finance, Website & organization
Ines Robberechts: Desk research, proofreading
Florence Thys: Collaborations with teams