Our attributions page details the contributions of all team members, as well as all outside supporting faculty, institutions, and mentors. Sources of funding and team structure are described on this page.
Our team members this year are Arjun Batra, Ani Srinivasan, Amber Wei, Alvira Tyagi, Aoi Otani, and Cody Chou, and our team leader is Robert Shekoyan. Our mentor is Ph.D. student Piyush Nanda. Our Principal Investigator is Professor Jia Liu at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (Harvard SEAS). We are grateful to have the wonderful opportunity to work with Piyush Nanda, who has introduced us to advanced computational and wet lab techniques and helped guide us through the project design. Additionally, we would like to thank our PI Dr. Liu for providing regular feedback and advice in developing and honing a project idea.
Our team is formed out of Harvard’s iGEM student organization that meets weekly to promote the field of synthetic biology through discussions, speaker events, and social activities. The ideation phase for the project started in January 2022 and continued throughout the spring, where the team met weekly to brainstorm ideas and review important literature in the field. All members of the team contributed in the analysis of current scientific literature and helped identify poteintial topics. Facilitated by our team leader Robert Shekoyan, the team conducted a thorough literature review of techniques within protein engineering and current computational protein design technologies. Dr. Liu also provided consistent guidance on finalizing a project idea. Once we narrowed down our focus, we reached out to professors and got connect with Professor Andrew Murray in the Molecular and Cellular Biology department of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (Harvard FAS), who helped fine tune our idea and introduced us to Piyush Nanda to help guide our project.
The research for our project lasted throughout the summer months of May to August. From the start, it became clear that our project would have two main focus areas: computational research and wet lab validation of computational results. Arjun Batra, Amber Wei, and Alvira Tyagi headed the computational aspect, and Arjun Batra, Ani Srinivasan, Aoi Otani, and Cody Chou lead the wetlab effort. Each team was responsible for the data collection, analysis, and vizualization associated with their focus. Piyush Nanda helped us through both parts of the project, guiding our computational brainstorming process as well as providing guidance for much of the wet lab techniques used in this project. Robert Shekoyan oversaw both the computational and wet lab research, holding regular meetings with the team. Robert mentored us on using various computational tools and performing wet lab protocols, and helped us interperet results, debug our pipeline, and develop future directions and experiments. Robert also conducted the organization of the project, ensuring the team stayed on top of related iGEM deliverables and met with SEAS faculty and other iGEM teams regularly. In addition, Dr. Melissa Hancock, Senior Engineer Avery Normandin, and Engineer Caroline Ko aided us in using the SEAS Biological Active Learning Labs for our experiments. Lastly, we would like to thank SEAS Communications Manager Matthew Goisman for interviewing our team over the regarding our project and publishing a SEAS article about our research over the summer, which can be found here.
We would like to thank Harvard SEAS for graciously funding our team’s research this year. We would like to thank Professor Liu and Faculty Coordinator Jessa Piaia for organizing the team's resources as well as the gracious funding we recieved from Harvard SEAS for our research. Robert Shekoyan coordinated our communications with Harvard's Committee on the Use of Human Subjects as well as with the Bioengineering Department of SEAS to ensure our project followed all ethical and safety guidelines.
We would like to thank all those who provided feedback for our porject or otherwise contributed to our Human Practices. We thank the labs of Sean Eddy, Sergey Ovchinnikov, Lee Rubin, and Andrew Murray for providing direct feedback on the computational, user design, and accessibility features of the project, and for finding the time to meet with us in-person throughout Spring 2022, the summer, and the current fall semester. Moreover, we thank all the clinical researchers who responded to our survey and provided valuable feedback. Lastly, we are extremely grateful to the BioStar summer bioengineering program and all those who participated in our weekly bioengineering bootcamps.
For our iGEM deliverables, all members contributed to the material for the wiki, and the wiki organization was performed by Robert Shekoyan. All members contributed to the content and images for the project promotional video and project description video, and Arjun Batra edited the videos. Ani Srinivasan composed the Project Abstract, Robert Shekoyan led the Human Practices, and Arjun Batra headed the collaboration effort with McGill University’s iGEM team. We would also like to thank McGill’s iGEM team for their cross validation of our results through their computational pipeline.