Contents
Team Attributions
Team Attributions. A blue square signifies that team member (columns) contributed to a certain project area (rows)
Principal Investigators
Prof. Chris French
Prof. Chris French, our Primary PI, kindly provided us with lab space, and scientific support regarding the biosensors, and gave project evaluation of all aspects of the project.
Prof. Kwabena O. Duedu
Prof. Kwabena O. Duedu, our PI on the Ghana side, gave us lots of information on heavy metal pollution in Ghana, provided us with lab space, and supported our sample collection of PET and heavy metal contaminated soil samples and subsequent metagenomic analysi.
Holly Pantidos
Holly Pantidos, one of our Secondary PIs, supported the team in organisation, fundraising and human practises. Her advice helped us form our overall project structure and was focal in shaping PETALUTION.
Dr. Nadanai Laohakunakorn
Dr. Nadanai Laohakunakorn, one of our Secondary PIs, provided critical project evaluation, and scientific support for directed evolution.
Lab Spaces
The French Lab
Mengxi Li
Mengxi provided feedback on the design of our biosensor and helped troubleshoot the many problems that we had with it by looking over our protocols. She also graciously provided ORTB buffer and DFHBI for our In-vitro transcription reactions and provided her own biosensor constructs for our negative control experiment and troubleshooting.
Joy Wan
Joy helped us with troubleshooting our biosensors, and advised us on the best ways to set up biosensor trials.
Julija Sabulyte
Julija also provided feedback on the design of our biosensor and helped troubleshoot many of our biosensing issues. In addition, she gave advice on rational aptamer design for removing internal restriction sites.
Florentina Winkelmann
Florentina assisted us with lab work while we were in the French Lab.
The University of Edinburgh MSc Lab
Dr. Heather Barker
Throughout the project, Heather was an enormous help to us. As the lab manager of the MSc Lab, she provided us with laboratory space and offered us necessary equipment. She also provided us with numerous protocols for various synthetic biology lab techniques. Furthermore, she helped extensively while troubleshooting our level 1 assemblies and competent cells. She also took part in the GBU Seminar with our Team. She also provided general advice on iGEM, and critically evaluated our project and gave constructive feedback throughout its course.
Richard Crerar
Richard also provided valuable technical support for the iGEM Team while we were in the MSc lab. He helped us perform difficult experiments, and with interpretation of results.
The Horsfall Lab
Giovanni Maddalena
The Horsfall Lab generously provided us with experimental advice, lab space, equipment and reagents. Giovanni Maddalena in particular was extremely helpful in his role as an advisor, giving useful feedback during weekly meetings, and helping us immensely with wet lab work.
Dr. Michael Capeness
Dr. Michael Capeness also helped us while working in the Horsfall lab, providing technical experimental support.
The Duedu Lab
Priscilla Efua Essandoh
Duedu Lab generously provided us with experimental advice, lab space, equipment and reagents. We would like to acknowledge Ms. Essandoh in particular for her guidance during lab work, as well as aiding in the sample collection process and community member engagement.
Redeemer Adawu
Mr. Redeemer also provided technical assistance and guidance during lab work.
Tractilis BioLabs
Rosina Carr
Tractilis Biolabs aided tremendously in providing lab space, reagents, advice, equipment and other consumables. Miss Carr trained the team and assisted in undertaking Nanopore metagenomic sequencing and Bioinformatic analysis.
Idan Baah Banson
Mr. Banson aided in the quantification of extracted DNA.
Wet Lab Support
Dr. Anton Puzorjov
Dr. Anton Puzorjov provided advice during the weekly meetings, guidance and feedback on experimental work and fundraising, and general advice on presentation and project management.
Dr. Marcos Valenzuela-Ortega
Dr. Marcos Valenzuela-Ortega, one of the designers of JUMP assembly, provided invaluable advice on the best approaches to JUMP design and assembly, and was very supportive throughout the project. He also provided us with a multitude of JUMP parts, including J23100, B0034 RBS, merR, L2U2H09 Terminator, Level 1 acceptors and Level 0 acceptors. His help was integral to the success of our project, as it is entirely centred around JUMP assembly.
Dr. Jones Gymafi
Dr. Jones Gyamfi is a Lecturer at the Department of Medical Laboratory Science, University of Health and Allied Sciences and the Chief Operations Officer of Tractilis Limited, an African Sustainable Biotechnology Company developing platforms for biofuels and biocatalysis and the Director of Operations for Tractilis BioLabs LBG, a non-profit research organization expanding access to practical training and resources in molecular biology. He is interested in the development of molecular biology tools for clinical diagnostics. He leads genome sequencing at the UHAS COVID-19 centre, and provided us with guidance throughout the project.
Prof. Lynne Regan
Prof. Lynne Regan is a Professor of Biochemistry, Head of the Institute of Quantitative Biology, Biochemistry and Biotechnology and Chair in Interdisciplinary Science, Center for Synthetic & Systems Biology at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Regan’s research field is protein-protein interactions and engineering protein-based biomaterials. She has been publishing research on the SpyTag-SpyCatcher technology and other modular proteins for hydrogels since 2010. She introduced us to the SpyTag-SpyCatcher system and gave us advice on fusing the metallothionein into the system in the parts design, how to recombinantly produce the monomers and the optimal conditions for hydrogel formation.
Joana Mends
Joana is a PhD student in the Andrew Free Lab in Edinburgh. We met with her to discuss issues in Ghana that could be solved with Synthetic Biology during the project ideation phase, and she provided guidance during project planning and design.
Rosanna Boni
Rosanna Boni, a PhD Student in Prof. Regan’s lab, helped us extensively in designing the SpyTag-SpyCatcher Hydrogels, supplied us with protocols for hydrogel formation, and helped us extensively during troubleshooting.
Prof. Patrick Heun
Prof. Patrick Heun, of the Wellcome centre for cell biology, kindly supplied us with BsmBI and BsaI.
Dr. David Clarke
Dr. David Clarke helped us process Native Mass Spectrometry samples, a difficult technique that would have been inaccessible to our team without his help.
Dr. Lorna Eades
Dr. Lorna Eades helped us with the challenging technique of Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry. She gave us excellent guidance on the best techniques process our hydrogel immobilised metallothionein samples, and then processed them for us. Without her, we would have not been able to get any results for bioremediation.
Dr. Joanna Sadler and Dr. Matt Edmundson
Dr. Joanna Sadler and Dr. Matt Edmundson kindly offered us a plasmid with the PETase double mutant, as well as giving us PET samples for biodegredation. Dr. Joanna Sadler also gave us extensive guidance on PET degradation, and was an enormous help to the success of our experiments.
Pedro Rangel de Faria
Pedro Rangel de Faria, a PhD student in Dr. Sadler's lab, shared advice with us on designing the PET biodegredation experiments.
Dr. Stephen Wallace
Dr. Stephen Wallace offered us valuable advice about potential problems, and suggested the entire idea of plastic community metagenomics.
Dry Lab Support
Arin Wongprommoon
Arin Wongprommoon provided advice, resources, and literature in the weekly meetings, always with a strong focus on bioinformatics. Arin was the key advisor for all computational work for the entire project, giving advice on modelling and the technical aspects of the wiki. He provided resources on using AlphaFold to resolve mutant protein structures, and instructed a sub-team on the Wiki in using Git, GitLab and editing the wiki. Additionally, he provided constructive comments on the wiki content, and also provided deoxyribonucleotides and miniprep spin columns for wet lab work.
Michael Stam
Michael helped us with generating AlphaFold structures of our metallothioneins.
Dr. Christopher Wells Wood
Dr. Christopher Wells Wood is the leader of the Wells Wood Research Group and Lecturer in Biotechnology, University of Edinburgh. He gave us advice on which biophysical techniques are most suitable for assaying metal-protein interactions and would give us the most appropriate data for our project.
Human Practises Support
Madam Emmanuella
Madam Emmanuella is the communications director of Zoomlion Company Limited. She helped us conduct the plastics interview, which gave us excellent information to shape our project around.
Nathaniel Thompson
Nathaniel Thompson is in charge of quality assurance for the Ghana Water Company. We conducted an interview with him concerning heavy metals, which helped us shape the biosensing and bioremediation sides of the project.
Dr. Annegret Honsbein
Dr. Honsbein kindly prepared all the bacteria and plates for the Painting with Bacteria workshop, and gave a presentation before the start of the workshop as well.
Dr. Bart Pander
Dr. Pander provided feedback towards our team, mainly on communication. He answered many questions the team had regarding iGEM, and helped guide brainstorming sessions during the initial project ideation phase. Dr. Pander also initiated the GBU Seminar, giving us a valuable experience in presentation.
Matteo Cese
Matteo gave us extensive guidance on fundraising, including maximising the funds raised during our bake sale fundraiser, helping us with grant application writing, outreach ideas and guidance on human practises.
Robert Smith
Rob Smith gave us guidance on reframing our human practises, so that we could adopt a unique approach based on the structure of our team in addition to just integrated human practises.
Artistic Support
Ruijun Zhang and Ziyi Wang
Ruijun Zhang filmed and edited our project promotion video in Edinburgh. He selected the various locations across Edinburgh for shooting, directed the filming, and edited our promotional video.
Ziyi Wang
Ziyi Wang took the drone footage seen in the promotional video, and on the main page.
Amemo Raphael Eyram
Amemo Raphael Eyram provided support in taking videos and pictures in Ghana of the various contaminated sites. He also helped with editing and guided decision making.
Collaborations
Team Hamburg
For organising the European Meetup from the 01-02 of July 2022.
Team Imperial College London
For hosting the UK iGEM Meetup of 2022.
Team Munich
For the incredible and fruitful partnership we had.
Team Freiburg
For the valuable knowledge exchanges we partook in.
Team Frankfurt
For our insightful discussions on metallothioneins.
Remarks
We wanted to thank everyone who supported us along the way, and those that contributed to our fundraising, allowing us to have the opportunity to go to the Grand Jamboree in Paris! If it weren't for you, we would not have been able to go!
