Attributions

Core Team Members

Vikram Venugopal

As the team lead, along with Aditi, Vikram managed and oversaw the process of keeping our overall project on track. He coordinated with our institute’s administration, finance, and accounting departments to get our orders, payments, and reimbursements done. Vikram also managed decision making processes and the handling of communication amongst the members of the team and between the team and external individuals.

As co-Head of Human Practices, Vikram assisted Pooja in the planning of HP activities and modules to achieve the targets that were set. He was a part of the planning and execution of the talks organised as part of outreach, and was involved in the communication with Dr. Sara Ahmed.

As a core member of the Wet Lab team, Vikram was involved in the complete execution of the module to express ACC Deaminase in E.coli. He was part of the Wet Lab experimental planning and also took up responsibility in logistics and ordering within Wet Lab.

For a brief time, Vikram worked on the Metabolic Modelling aspect of the Dry Lab, where he worked on figuring out the biochemical pathway through which ACC would be metabolised in the engineered Azospirillum brasilense Sp7.

Aditi Palo

As the team lead, Aditi oversaw the progress of every department throughout the iGEM cycle ensuring that the project developed as smoothly as possible in a timely manner.

Along with Vikram, she coordinated with the respective people to get administrative work regarding payments, registrations and other paperwork done ahead of the deadlines without fail.Whenever crucial team decisions had to be made, or miscommunications within the team had to be sorted out, she stepped in. She was also incharge of accounting and handling the money raised in the fundraiser.

As a core member of the wetlab team, she helped brainstorm for ideas during the initial stages of the project. Along with other members of the team, she went to BHU, to learn more about molecular biology techniques related to Azospirillum, and help create successful clones - which is integral for the project. Apart from this, she worked on ideating a biocontainment strategy which is a part of our proposed implementation, and also planning out assays for our proof of concept.

As a member of Human Practices, Aditi was an integral part of every outreach activity, right from actively planning, communicating , and actually carrying it forward during the sessions, ensuring it was a success. She also met and interacted with multiple professors, to get their inputs regarding our project and to get contacts to take our project further.

Atharva Valanju

Atharva was the one who came up with the initial idea of Hydrazome. He was involved in explaining the idea to nearly all the professors in IISER Pune during the ideation process.

Being the Wet Lab head he was a crucial part of planning all the experiments and making sure they are carried out to perfection. He was the primary point of contact with Dr. Anil Kumar Tripathi and everyone else from BHU. He, along with two other members, went to BHU to learn Azospirillum-specific molecular biology techniques and during his time there he was involved in successfully making clones which were integral to the project. Apart from this he was involved in handling the logistics and orders related to Wet Lab.

As a member of the Human Practices team, he planned and organised the interactive sesion with Krishi Vigyaan Kendra farmers. Apart from this, he hosted the 'Accessibility To Synthetic Biology' webinar along with Parneet from the UBC iGEM team. He also interacted with school students for multiple outreach activities.

Grishma Mehta

Grishma was involved in the planning and execution of school and college modules of HP.

She headed the Wet Lab department with Atharva. She was involved in the experiment al planning of the project. She manages the logistics of the Wet Lab department like finances, ordering of reagents, and laboratory. She was initially involved in making the exaA-mCherry construct. She was also involved in making the game of the synthetic biology exhibit in Mimamsa. She went to Sant Tukaram school for educating the students. I tried to organise a session in blind school but the session couldn’t happen due to lack of time. I also went to Modern College for outreach.

Grishma is our second Co-Head of Wet Lab. Besides Wet Lab, she is also a core member of Human Practices.

Ryth Dasgupta

Ryth is the head of the Dry Lab, and was in charge of the computational and mathematical modelling of our project. He developed the narrative that the diffusion, kinetic and metabolic modelling follows, and helped in the initial ideation stages of climate modelling. He did the kinetic and metabolic modelling for the project. Ryth also ran point in facilitating the partnership with the UBC team.

Ryth contributed to the sponsorship pitches for the major sponsorship companies, and pitched to our major sponsors during fundraising. He also pitched to the head of International Advertising Association India Chapter, Mr. Ramesh Narayan to get a time slot in the prestigious Olive Crown Awards. Ryth also gave the speech at the Olive Crown Awards which was attended by the environment minister of the state Maharashtra. He also helped in the logistics of the travel and stay within Paris.

On the creative front, Ryth was the official photographer and videographer for the team. He took team photos, and photos at events for the team. He also directed, shot and edited the Team Promo Video, designed the Hydrazome poster and the team reveal slides, and designed the hoodies for the team. Ryth handles the Twitter account for the team.

Pooja Kuruvilla

As the Human Practices head, Pooja oversaw and helped organise a lot of the outreach, educational, and science communication that the team had. She managed the sponsorship and outreach volunteers from the support team as well. She has organised webinars and taken part in a few of the various outreach activities.

Being a part of the Wet Lab team, she performed some preparatory experiments such as competent cell preparation and transformation. She majorly worked on the EPS aspect of the project, from background research to experimental planning. She has been involved with a majority of written content such as mails, brochures for sponsorship, presentations for occasions such as AIIM, and the Promega and Impact grant. She has also worked on designing a few social media posts.

Apart from this, she was a major part of the wiki team, from design and layout to the coding of the wiki. She has spent hours along with Sneha and others to get this wiki up and running!

Uyyashrinila P

Nila has been a core Wet Lab team member since the beginning. She helped brainstorm for ideas and took part in their refinement. She went to Banaras Hindu University and was involved in the production of three successful clones - pCZ-exaA-acdS, pCZ-fdhF and pAK002-kanR-acdS. She also performed the other experiments tried there like the pellicle experiment, growth curves and sodium sulphite experiments. She helped out with traditional cloning, sodium sulphite growth curves and phenol red assay in IISER. She helped materialize two major contributions - The Azospirillum handbook and the FNR-UnaG composite part. She played a major role in the ideation and development of the biocontainment strategy.

As an HP member, she volunteered in the Synthetic Biology Mimamsa stall where she engaged the audience with information on iGEM and synthetic biology. As a member of the school HP module, she was involved in the planning and execution of the outreach activities done at schools. She communicated with the school officials for the Sant Tukaram Activity Book outreach activity and participated in the sessions with the students. She also performed the DNA extraction for the students at Loyola school. She was also involved in meeting professors and documenting their inputs for IHP. She attended the All India iGEM Meet at IISc and spoke Wet Lab parts of the presentation.

As the Documentation & Content head, she has been documenting all the meetings and overseeing the documentation in other departments.

Anwesha Raychaudhuri

Anwesha mostly worked in the project's Climate Modellling in Dry Lab along with Ruchir. She also handled emailing for the team which was the main mode of communication with most of our sponsors and stakeholders.

She looked into the Measurement and Safety aspects of the project where we had to make sure that we followed the safety and calibration standards set by iGEM.

She was also involved with Entrepreneurship and HP departments. In Entrepreneruship, she worked on market analysis and scalability and was a part of the AIC StEP organised by the AIC SEED IISER Pune.

In HP, she was mostly involved in organising and hosting webinars along with contacting speakers for the talk series. Also, she helped in contacting lawyers and biofertiliser companies who are important stakeholders in the project.

She also helped with figuring out Git and GitLab and debugging of some parts of the wiki.

Somdatta Naskar

Somdatta has been a core wetlab team member since idea refinement. She has helped throughout in planning and designing experiments. She was mainly involved in characterising the exaA promoter in E.coli. She performed blue-white screening to check for exaA activity under glycerol induction. She then performed RF cloning to make the exaA-mCherry construct in pET15b. She also helped out with the ACC assay. She helped maintain Wet Lab logistics. She has been responsible for sending out mails throughout our iGEM cycle.

As an HP member, she helped set up the Synthetic Biology Mimamsa stall and carried out the flashcard game. She went to Vangaon and Kosbad to talk to local biofertiliser shops and farmers with the help of the KVK. She helped in planning all the outreach activities for students. She helped in taking the sessions of the Sant Tukaram school and The Bishop’s Co-Ed School. She also went to the AIIM to present our project.

Being the Social Media Head, she planned all the social media posts and activities. She has been the primary contact with the other iGEM teams through Instagram DMs, emails and the Slack platform. She planned the Environment Day and Desertification Survey collaborations and helped execute them along with managing all the collaborations with the other teams.

Sneha Jain

Sneha handles been a core Dry Lab team member since idea refinement. She solely handled the Diffusion Modelling of our project. She met several professors to get their inputs as IHP for guidance and execution of the model.

As the Design Head, Sneha created presentations for Project Proposal, Sponsorship pitches, the AIIM event, the AIC StEP competition and many more. She designed the brochure for our sponsorship campaign and posts for social media throughout our cycle. She illustrated the pretty graphics which are spread throughout our wiki. She also designed our mascot, Azorah. She was also in-charge of designing our activity book 'Protecting our Plants with Urvi' and the comic strip 'Azorah Saves the Day'.

For HP, Sneha worked for the Synthetic Biology Mimamsa stall and helped in making the games and setting up the stall. She helped in almost every aspect of HP by designing the posters for webinar, surveys, and sessions.

She has been an integral part of the wiki team and spent energy on organising the structure of the work, designing the layout of the wiki, coding for it as well as troubleshooting everything along with Pooja. Along with her and others we spent hours to get the wiki done in just 15 days!

Sneha was also responsible for handling volunteers and managing the work in the design and wiki department.

Ruchir Sahni

Ruchir is our Entrepreneurship Head. He has been pitching our project idea to almost every professor in IISER Pune to get inputs and contacts for sponsorship - he was an important part of our pitch team. Along with Pooja, he worked on the Promega and Impact grants and got our team registered as a pre-incubatee in AIC (Atal Incubation Centre).

Along with others, he volunteered at the Synthetic biology exhibit and has been a point of contact in the iGEM Global Slack. He is a core team member of Dry Lab and worked on codon optimisation and Climate Modelling. He also made the Heatwave Model.

He has worked on the proposed implementation of our project, AIC STEP - an on-campus Pitch Competition, and AIIM. He has been helping in the development of the Wiki and has been working on the Entrepreneurship page of our wiki. For the business part of our project, he has done - Business Model, SWOT analysis, stakeholder analysis, Description, Mission-Vision statement and applied for the Innovation Summit at Pravega.

Ruchir did work in HP and that includes a trip to KVK(Krishi Vigyaan Kendra), preparing a list of questions for biofertiliser companies, essay on areas affected by waterlogging, and creating a list of schools for outreach. He also conducted sessions for school children. As a part of the MSP collaboration, he submitted a paper for peer review that he authored.

Ishani Hira

Ishani is the Sponsorship Head of our team. She has been overseeing our sponsorship meetings, pitches and networking to looks for investors. She has pitched to professors of IISER Pune for funding opportunites and was a part of the Pitch Team. Alongs with her teammates, she has been working with the institute's admin, specifically for sponsorship work.

Ishani is now in the Entreprenership department, where she has contributed by doing risk analysis of the project. She was one of the three participants in AIC StEP - an on campus pitching competition. Her pitch during the day of competition won the team the grand first prize! She has also participated in Pravega, an innovation summit at IISc Bangalore. She is a StEP fellow, and attends regular classes on entrepreneurship which she then implements on our project

Ishani has been in the Wet Lab department in the beginning of the project for couple of months and spend her time learning and executing basic biotechnological procedures.

In the Human Practices department, Ishani has helped in IHP, college module, and visited a school as a part of school module.

Paarth Dudani

Paarth has been an integral part of the Sponsorship department since the beginning. He has been part of pitching our idea to various companies along with others in the team. On his own, he has also reached out and pitched the team idea to various professors across IISER and sales representatives from numerous companies dealing with IISER.

He has also been part of helping out with conducting wet-lab experiments for a brief duration in summer. He was also in charge of sending out mails on the behalf of the team in the initial phase of the iGEM cycle.

He coded for the preliminary version of the wiki.

Support Team

Sponsorship Volunteer

Ajinkya Ranshur, Sashank Chandra, Abhinav Kannan, Neelanshi Jain, Arnav Mishra, Sanskruti Phule, Sneha N

The sponsorship volunteers helped us out tremendously by contacting potential sponsors for our project as well as looking through possible grants. A special thanks to Ajinkya Ranshur, Abhinav Kannan, and Sashank Chandra who went out of their way to curate a targeted and organised list of sponsors for us.

Design Volunteers

Swayam P. Singh, Aditya Moger, Deep Veer Shah, Mehzabin B. K., Sanskruti Phule, Balagopal Nair

Swayam helped with the scientific illustrations for social media posts and wiki and activity book cover design. He also made the Pravega Innovation Summit Presentation.

Aditya Moger, Deep Veer Shah- Helped with the illustrations for the wiki, designing posters, brochure, banners and ppts for various events. They also worked for cctivity Book illustration and designing.

Mehzabin B.K., Sanskruti Phule- Social Media posts designing.

Balagopal Nair- Activity Book illustration and designing.

Special thanks to VS Krishna helping and illustrating the characters, Urvi Monu and Amma for the activity book

Vikrant Kaushik and his team- In helping with the illustration and graphic designing for the comic strip series

Social Media Volunteers

Prateek Makhija, Kaustubh Javkar, Ajinkya Ranshur, Arnav Mishra helped in creating the content of Social Media posts.

Mehzabin P K, Sanskruti Phule helped in designing Social Media posts.

Outreach Volunteers

Adheena Elsa Roy, Anuraag Robin, Eshwar, Gaadha Vinukumar, Kavya Vinoy Thaliaparambil, Medha Murti, Neelanshi Jain, Nikita Kumari, Vaishnavi Reghunath

We are really thankful for the support and help given to us by the outreach volunteers: they went over and beyond when helping us out.

Medha, Abhinav, and Sashank aided us by curating the questions for the Mimamsa Science Fest. Vaishnavi helped us out by searching for schools in Pune for the visually impaired and coming up with guidelines to abide by while teaching. Nikita, Adheena, and Vaishnavi came up with the activity book used to teach kids.

Eshwar, Medha, and Gaadha drafted the comic strip which was put up on our instagram and served as a way for us to communicate our idea. Vaishnavi, Nikita, and Medha structured the lesson plans for the sessions we held with kids.

We would also like to thank Adheena for translating the activity book into Malayalam; Sanchit Nayak and Kishan K R for translating the activity book into Kannada.

Special thanks to Neelanshi, Kavya, and Kashika Singh who translated the audio from the interviews into English really fast.

Wiki Volunteers

Vignesh M Pai, Sashank Chandra, Deep Shah, Deepika

Vignesh and Sashank have helped with animations and debugging. Deep and Deepika have helped extensively with putting content on the pages. Vignesh also helped in troubleshooting and helping the the elements for the design of the code.

We would also like to thank Purva Parmar, Aarti Kuruvilla, and Maharshi Parekh who helped us with the GitLab platform. They helped us troubleshoot setting it up locally which made working on the wiki much easier.

We would also like to thankGargi Roy who helped in making the basic framework for the subpages of the wiki.

Principal Investigators

Prof. Saikrishnan Kayarat

Prof. Kayarat is our Primary Principal Investigator. His presence was always important for us in every team meeting. He was invested in our project and gave us useful advice and guidance for both Wet Lab and Dry Lab. Prof. Kayarat took care of all our administrative work. He agreed to supervise all of our Wet Lab members for their semester project. Working with his was a pleasure for the whole and we are grateful to him for being an amazing PI.

Dr. Mridula Nambiar

Dr. Nambiar is our Secondary Principal Investigator. She has always showed up in our team meeting and guided us in our project. Dr. Nambiar helped us with getting our very first sponsorship opportunity which was both a morale booster for us, and helped us kickstart our project. She has always been very accomodating of our wishes and we are really grateful to have worked with her.

Student Mentors

Sanjana Vasanth and Namasivayam Sankar, and Utkarsh Mahajan

Sanjana, Namasi, and Utkarsh guided us in every possible way throughout the iGEM cycle. They helped us structure our departments and plan the project further in our weekly meetings. We were lucky to have experienced iGEMers as our student mentors, whose inputs significantly improved our project. We also thank Sanjana for aiding us with the Impact Grant; she sat with us for hours and helped us fine-tune it.

PhD Mentors

Rushik Bhatti, Akansha Ganguly, Srijan Das, and Purva Gupta

They were instrumental in guiding us throughout our project cycle. We received multiple inputs from them during the ideation phase which we incorporated in our design. Since none of our Wet Lab members had any prior experience, our PhD mentors taught us all the basic techniques and procedures involved in molecular biology. They were involved in troubleshooting all the problems which we encountered in the lab.

Banaras Hindu University

Anil Kumar Tripathi

Professor Anil Kumar Tripathi, Director of Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University, tremendously helped us in getting the Wet Lab of the project to where it is now. Through his constant inputs and support, we were able to refine the theory of our Wet Lab. He sent us his Azospirillum strains. He also generously provided us with lab space, essential Wet Lab resources and accomodation at BHU. He offered guidance with troubleshooting experiments and helped us make successful clones.

Vijay Shankar Singh

Dr. Vijay Shankar Singh at Banaras Hindu University helped us in modifying our Wet Lab theory. He also helped us troubleshoot each and every step of our experiments and advised us on multiple topics. Many of our Azospirillum experiments were optimized with his help.

Aritra Biswas

One of our PhD mentors at Banaras Hindu University, Aritra, helped us learn essential Wet Lab cloning techniques like PCR, transformation, restriction digestion, ligation, colony PCR, gel electrophoresis, plasmid extraction, PCR purification and Azospirillum specific experiments like the conjugation experiment. We also learnt how to maintain Azospirillum brasilense Sp7 and Azospirillum lipoferum under him. He also helped us understand how genomic integration is done in Azospirillum brasilense Sp7. He oversaw our work in producing three clones: pCZ-exaA-acdS, pCZ-fdhF and pAK002-kanR-acdS. He also helped us with troubleshooting during the cloning processes.

Parikshit

Parikshit, one of our PhD mentors in Banaras Hindu University, helped us understand the basics of the pellicle experiment and helped us learn how to set it up.

Sushant

Sushant, one of our PhD mentors in Banaras Hindu University, helped us learn how to maintain and deal with Azospirillum lipoferum for our future experiments. He also helped us understand how to set up growth curves for the various Azospirillum strains.

Special Thanks

Dr. Anjan Banerjee

Dr Banerjee helped us tremendously in sponsorship and logistics. We owe a lot of our success in raising funds to him. On more than one occasion, we have seen him go out of his way to make sure that everything went well for us. He believed in our project stongly and we are really grateful that he was part of our journey.

CA Vasundhara Laad

Navigating through college admin department can be very difficult. Vasundhara ma'am always made sure that we did not have to spend more time working on admin and logistics than needed. She was instrumental in helping us with our finance management. We want to thank her for making our job easier.

Ms. Shweta Uttam

Ms. Uttam has been instrumental in helping us with our work in entrepreneurship. She also helped us by giving contacts of experts in various fields. She is always there to boost our morale and help us is every possible way when it come to entrepreneurship.

Dr. Sara Ahmed

Dr. Sara Ahmed has been invested in our project nearly from the beginning and has given us amazing feedback, encouragement, and support. She went out of her way to put is in contact with people such as Dr. Shiraz who helped us immensely. We truly appreciate how much effort she along with other members of Living Waters Museum have put into helping us with our project.

Jason Joby

We cannot express enough how grateful we are to Jason and his patience. He truly saved us with our wiki. Without him, it would not have been possible to get our wiki up and running. Jason helped us fix errors and give advice on elements to include in our wiki. He sat with us for hours and aided us tremendously. Thank you very much for all your help Jason.

Neena Dasgupta and Ramesh Narayanan

We want to thank them for giving us the opportunity to speak Olive Crown Awards.

Dry Lab Attributions

Diffusion Modelling

Dr. Anki Reddy Pritha IIT Tirupati, Dr. Apratim Chatterjee IISER Pune, Dr. Sjon Hartman University of Freiburg, Olivier Martin for inputs and guidance throughout the model; Ashish Kumar (PhD student under Dr. Arnab Mukherjee IISER Pune) for helping with molecular dynamics and working on finding the diffusion coefficient of ACC using VMD; Atreyi Chakraborty and Mukundan S. for help with troubleshooting.

UBC iGEM 2022 team for helping with the experimental verification of the concentration gradient of the exuding ACC from the roots.

Metabolic and Kinetic Modelling

Dr. Karthik Raman, IIT Madras : during the initial stages of our planning, we were hoping to use a Genome Scale Model of A. brasilense in order to better understand the effects acdS would have on the system. Unfortunately, there was no GSM available for A. brasilense and we turned to Karthik Raman—an Associate Professor at IIT Madras working in a Computational Systems Biology Lab—for help. He told us about ModelSEED and how to go about constructing a pathway model and eventually a GSM for our bacteria. He gave us access to his online lectures in order to better understand metabolic modelling. We also had a few doubts regarding maximum productivity which he helped us with: he told us that since enzymes are not a component of GSMs we need to maximise their fluxes through the concerned reactions.

Dr. Anu Raghunathan, NCL Pune: we were in constant contact with Anu Raghunathan while working on metabolic models. She helped with the concepts used in modelling and guided us as we went.

Dr. MS Madhusudhan, IISER Pune: we were in constant contact with Dr. Madhusudhan while working on metabolic models. He helped with the concepts used in modelling and guided us as we went.

Vijendra Kavatalkar, NCL Pune: we were in constant contact with Vijendra Kavatalkar while reconstructing and developing the metabolic models. He helped with the technical aspects such as coding for the use of the Cobra Toolbox.

Climate Modeling

Dr. Joy M. Monteiro IISER Pune, Dr. Sudipta Sarkar IISER Pune - Dr. Monteiro and Dr.Sudipta helped us in the ideation of the waterlogging and the heatwave climate models. They helped us with understanding the softwares and also with the algorithm.

Science Activity Centre

We received help from them for Mimamsa Synthetic Biology Exhibit Stall. They also helped us with our school module.