Mentors

Prof. Srinivas Hotha: Our PI, without whom this project would not have been able to get off the ground. He was instrumental in the formation of our team and facilitated all our interactions with the institute for smooth functioning of the project.

Dr Mehmet Berkmen: Our secondary PI, and Ubermeister of the Universe. He is the inventor of the SHuffle strain, and helped us immensely with his expertise, mentorship, reference material and access to SHuffle strains, necessary reagents and protein folding chaperones for SHuffle.

Gunwant Patil: Our student mentor, who has been a source of guidance and was instrumental in connecting us with our lab mentors.

Ekta Gupta: With her experience in molecular biology work, she taught us how to clone genes, run agarose gels, and how to do a Western blot. She was generous with her time and attention, always willing to help us troubleshoot.

Mamatharani DV: An expert in protein purification and biochemical assays, she taught us how to conduct affinity pull-down for His-tagged proteins, and helped us understand what future steps we could take after our project's preliminary success.

Bhagyashree Deshmukh: She taught us how to conduct purification with Protein A beads, how to conduct alkaline lysis, and gave us several helpful tips for cloning. More broadly, she taught how to interpret and use the results of an experiment to optimise and proceed with the next round.

Ashwin Uday: He was the first to show us the ropes in a molecular biology lab, teaching us how to pipette, make culture media and cotton plugs, discard waste and use a laminar hood. He taught us several techniques that we used throughout the cycle, from bacterial culturing to SDS-PAGE. He helped us perform our SYPRO Orange Thermal shift Assay. He also taught us how to make chemically competent cells. He was a constant source of support and guidance, incredibly patient with our mistakes and problems.

Karthik Shanbag: He gave us some helpful tips that improved the quality of our restriction digests, and increased our success rate with cloning.

Benchamin Abraham: Taught us how to transform bacterial cells, and how to conduct small scale purifications with Protein A beads. He taught that protocols can be tweaked to compensate for non-ideal conditions.

Mukundan S: He was helpful in almost every aspect of our modeling and sped things up whenever we were in a ditch.

Experts

Dr Vidya Mangala Prasad: She was a flaviviral structural biologist at the Indian Institute of Science. Extremely knowledgeable about her field, she was instrumental in helping us choose the right epitope for our NeoFv.

Dr Rahul Roy: He is a researcher in chemical engineering at IISc who also works on Dengue. They helped us with protocol for the VLP fusion assay and offered expertise as well as lab material to help us conduct it.

Prof Satyajit Rath: He is an immunologist and Professor Emeritus at our institute. He helped us with constructive criticism in the initial phases of our project ideation and helped us improve our scientific proposal in the later part of the project.

Prof Vineeta Bal: She is an immunologist and Professor Emeritus at our institute. She helped us with constructive criticism and guidance in the initial stages of our project and also guided us to resources on Dengue and choosing dengue-specific antibodies.

Dr Siddhesh Kamat: He is an Associate Professor of Biology at our institute. He helped us narrow down our initial list of project proposals. He was also helpful in providing us with expertise in designing protocols and laboratory material for the Sypro Orange assay.

Dr MS Madhusudhan: He is a computational structural biologist and Associate Professor of Biology at our Institute, who helped us from the beginning of our project in most aspects of our modeling. He also provided us with access to the resources and students at the COSPI group, and also helped us in contacting Mimamsa for outreach.

Dr Gayathri Pananghat: She is an Associate Professor of Biology at our Institute. She helped us out when some of our experimental results weren't making sense, and spared us resources from her lab when we needed it.She gave us protein A beads.

Dr Leelavati Narlikar: She is a data scientist at IISER, Pune. She helped us by connecting us to Dr Mugdha Gadgil.

Dr Amrita Hazra: She is a Biochemist working as an Assistant Professor at IISER, Pune. She helped us with concentrating our proteins by providing us access to a centricon.

Prof Arnab Mukherjee: He is a computational chemist and Professor of Chemistry at our institute. He helped us in many aspects of running molecular dynamics simulations.

Dr Thomas Howard: He is a senior lecturer at University of Newcastle and an expert in statistical design of experiments in synthetic biology. He helped us understand DoE and interpret the results.

Prof Milind Gore: He is a flavivirus expert and former director of the National Institute of Virology in Pune. We are grateful for the elaborate discussions with him where we came with a design for a MAC-ELISA protocol for testing the functionality of our NeoFvs.

Dr Mugdha Gadgil: She is a scientist at National Chemical Laboratory, Pune and a CHO cell recombinant protein production expert. She helped us with understanding Design of Experiments philosophy and helped us think about alternate expression systems for our NeoFvs.

Prof Nishikant Subhedar: He is a professor at our institute, and helped us understand the pharmaceutical industry, and how drugs would move from ideation to testing to market.

Logistics

Mayuresh Kulkarni and Sanjay Kumar Meena: They helped us with booking seminar/discussion room for our meetings.

Swapnil Bhuktar: He helped us with booking LHC rooms for our meetings and obtaining cover letters and NOCs.

Kalpesh Thakare: He works at the biostore of our institute. They handled the paperwork of all our orders and provided us with glassware, containers, stationery, etc. for our project.

Dildaar Seth and Santosh Kumar: They are helpers at our institute and helped with cleaning the lab and washing and autoclaving our lab equipment and media.

Piyush Gadekar: He works at the biostores of our institute. He handled the paperwork of all our orders and provided us with glassware, containers, stationery, etc. for our project.

Shravee Shetty (Shabnam): She is in-charge of the undergraduate biology laboratory at the institute and facilitated access to our bench space, instruments and some common reagents.

Dr Sudha Rajamani: She is the Deputy Chair of our biology department. She helped us finalize the costs and reagents needed for the project.

Prof Thomas Pucadyil: The former Chair of our biology department, he facilitated the procurement of materials from the biostores and other necessary permissions in the biology department.

Dr Richa Rikhy: The current Chair of our biology department, she facilitated our procurement of materials from the biostores and other necessary permissions in the biology department. She also helped out with sending samples for plasmid sequencing.

Dr Krishnapal Karmodiya: He helped us critique our work in the early stages of our project, and narrow down ideas for the same.

Dr Nisha Kurkure: She is the Senior Technical Officer of High Performance Computing at our Institute. She helped us with setting up our account on the institute’s PARAM Brahma supercomputer and installing relevant softwares for our work.

Rupali Jadhav: She works in our institute's biostore, and helped us with the logistics of plasmid sequencing.

Other Wet Lab/Dry Lab Help

Akash: He taught us how to use a Nanodrop machine to estimate DNA concentration, and with troubleshooting SDS Page.

Akanksha: She gave us advice on how to use a Nanodrop machine, and helped us out with some theory regarding miniprep.

Mrinmayee Bapat: She helped us with understanding the Sypro orange assay, designing a protocol for the same and helped us perform the assay successfully.

Kaveri Vaidya: She helped us with understanding the Sypro orange assay, designing a protocol.

Shirsa Palit: She helped us with their expertise in handling SHuffle cells, and gave us several helpful tips on how to handle and optimise the strain.

Harshit Pateria: He helped us with setting up and operating AlphaFold 2.0 on PARAM Brahma and other aspects in modelling.

Atreyi: She helped us with running molecular dynamics simulations on our NeoFvs.

Venkata Sai Sreyas Adury: He helped us immensely with almost all modelling aspects in our dry lab.

Golding Rodrigues: Golding helped us with understanding molecular docking softwares.

Andrew Symes: Andrew is the dry lab mentor for Team Calgary 2022. We received mentorship from them in molecular modelling in our collaboration.

Adithyan Unni: He helped us in multiple parts of our dry lab effort.

Ayush Madhok: He helped us understand the mechanism and purpose of the CIP enzyme in cloning, and helped us troubleshoot our cloning.

Isha Desai: She was helpful in helping us understand how to quantify DNA from an agarose gel, and lent us some of her LB when we needed it.

Sukanya Chakraborty: She was helpful to us in understanding some small details of the way SDS-PAGEs can go wrong, and how some proteins can run erroneously on the same.

S.Rohan: He is a 5th-year student from the lab of Dr Hazra. He gave us a 50 mL centricon and helped us get started on using it.

Others - Several people we met were helpful to us in troubleshooting our experiments, and fixing our protocols and equipment.

Ankita Sharma
Disha Shah
Adesh
Greg Dsilva
Nilam Malankar
Santam Saha
Balaji AK

Outreach

Dr Aparna Deshpande, Mr Ashok Rupner, and Mr Ankish Tirpude: They are members of the Smt Indrani Balan Science Activity Centre and were instrumental in helping us contact various schools in Pune as part of our public education initiatives.

Dr Tejas Kalelkar and Prof VS Rao: They are professors at our institute, and helped us organise the blood donation drive at our institute and got us in touch with the Rotary Club of Pune, Shivajinagar as well.

Siddharth Sharma and Saransh Agrawal: They were responsible for the organisation of the Mimamsa Science Fest and helped us in setting up our synthetic biology stall.

Dr Mehmet Berkmen, Dr Narendra Chirmule, Dr Vinod Joyuthikumar and Prof Satyajit Rath: They were kind enough to agree to give enlightening talks in the webinars that we conducted.

Special Thanks

Dr Narendra Chirmule: Dr Chirmule helped us understand taking this project further from the perspective of industrial drug development. We are also grateful to him for delivering a talk on Gene Therapy in one of our outreach efforts.

Dr Sanjeev Wavere: he is the health officer at Pune Municipal Corporation. He helped us obtain Dengue case demographic data in the city and informed us about the actions of PMC during a Dengue outbreak.

Ms Trupti Kamble: she works on insect control in the Pune Municipal Corporation health department. She shared with us the relevant data and explained to us how to use it.

Sandeep Raut: he is the head of Atal Incubation Center at our Institute. He helped us improve our presentation for potential sponsors.

Varsha Jaisimha: Varsha is an experienced iGEMer and was the After iGEM Coordinator for 2021. She was very helpful in evaluating our project in terms of how it fits into the iGEM competition and was a source of constant support to us.

Chinmay Patwardhan: Chinmay is an experienced iGEMer and was the team lead of the 2020 iGEM team from our institute. He helped us get started in iGEM and kept checking up on us in the initial stages. He helped out considerably with the ins and out of administrative work.

Rupal Gehlot: Rupal was the human practices head of team IISER Pune 2020. She guided us in planning our entire iHP effort.

Avadhoot Jadhav: Avadhoot was part of IISER Pune 2020 team and iGEM Ambassador for Asia. He helped us initially in brainstorming and advised us on how to make our team official.

Anthony David: he helped us in the early stages of our project advising us how to go about the iGEM journey.

VS Krishna Iyer: he came to the rescue at the last minute and helped us by illustrating the designs used in our Promo Video.

Kavya Vinoy Thaliaparambil: she helped us out by clicking great photos of our team and mentors at a very short notice.

Samarthanan Trust for the Disabled: an organisation that helps the underpriveleged and disabled. We thank them for allowing us to speak to the women at the Home when we visited, and letting us conduct an eduactional session for some of the orphans under their charge.

Volunteers

Outreach

Ameya Kherde, Apoorvaa Gopal, Seona Paranjape, Sidharth Das, Rajalaxmi Behera, Sakshi Kumari, Mugdha Thatte
Ameya, Apoorvaa and Sakshi helped us with setting up the stall at the science fest. Ameya, Apoorvaa, Seona and Sidharth assisted us in preparing the presentation for our school outreach efforts. Rajalaxmi and Sakshi were helpful in designing the activity book. Ameya, Sakshi and Mugdha helped write the content for some of our blog posts. We are grateful to have worked with such enthusiastic volunteers.

Design

Neha Verma, Neeraj Devasthale, Yuvraj Belani, Authisha, Tanmaay Jena
The design volunteers were dedicated and helped us create designs and illustrations to portray in various places in our project activities like the activity book, poster for Mimamsa Science Fest, some social media posts and wiki illustrations.

Social Media

Achyusman Samanta, Arjun MD, Prabhav Kumar, Amerya Kherde, Neha Shamsudheen, Rajalaxmi Behera
Our social media volunteers helped us design social media posts aimed at synthetic biology outreach.