Attributions

iGEM has allowed our team to foster a community of synthetic biology enthusiasts who have ideated and executed this project. The team is grateful to the iGEM foundation for facilitating this opportunity.

The team is extremely grateful to our PI, SI, advisors, sponsors, and our institute, IIT Delhi, for supporting this endeavor. Their support and guidance were integral to our success.

This project is ideated and executed entirely by the undergraduate team members with guidance from our faculty and advisors. Our journey with iGEM began in January 2022 when the team began ideating the project. We brainstormed through multiple potential project ideas throughout the month and settled on a feasible yet impactful idea with the help of our PI. We strategized the entire workflow and cloning strategy through the months of February and May to concretize the idea. We began ordering the consumables and the safety training in the month of May with the help of our advisors, instructor, and lab technicians. Since then, the wet lab, dry lab, human practices, marketing, and social media and outreach divisions have worked independently on their sub-objectives to achieve the shared goal of addressing lead poisoning and contamination. We have received constant support from our PI, SI, and mentors throughout the project.

Faculty support

Primary Investigator

Prof. Preeti Srivastava was our primary faculty advisor and coordinator. Not only did she help us ideate the project by vetting our scientific ideas, but she also got her hands wet with us in the lab when we struggled with our experiments. We are extremely grateful for her passion and desire to help the student community learn. She oversaw the wet lab aspect of the project and also helped tackle administrative hurdles.

Secondary Investigator

Prof. D. Sundar regularly checked in on the progress of the project and provided valuable feedback. He helped structure the team and our timelines. He also provided guidance and access to bioinformatics software for the dry lab modelling. Additionally, he has acted as an interface between the student team and the institute administration and helped us obtain lab space.

Advisors

Nidhee Nitin Patil

Instructor

She played an integral role in the wet lab success of the project by providing day-to-day guidance in performing experiments, handling equipment and practicing safety in the process. Her wet lab expertise has been extremely valuable for the project.

Agrima Deedwania

Advisor

Agrima conducted the initial safety training and introduced the team to lab etiquettes. She helped the team, which had little to no lab experience, get comfortable with standard protocols. She played a significant role in the project ideation, registration and in figuring out the cloning strategy for the wet lab experiments. She was also instrumental in administrative tasks like registration and in procuring lab space and funding.

Sriram Kumar

Advisor

He was matched with our team by iGEM as our mentor. He has guided us throughout the project in terms of structuring the team, improving our understanding of what iGEM expects, the best way to achieve our technical objectives and the kind of initiatives we should take in human practices and education. He has regularly vetted our forms and submissions and given timely feedback.

Team Attributions

Dhwani Teckchandani

Dhwani has served as the Student Leader of the team. She ideated the entire project and devised the experimental strategy. She oversaw the smooth functioning of all divisions of the team - wet lab, dry lab and human practices. She also worked in the wet lab and its scheduling. Additionally, she has been responsible for all administrative tasks like procuring lab space, registration and funding from the institute.

Apar Ahuja

Apar was the co-lead of the team and also the Dry Lab Lead on the project. He headed and ideated the structural and mathematical modelling aspects of the project. He was also responsible for setting up collaborations and partnerships with other iGEM teams. Additionally, he has played an integral role in the cross-pollination of ideas across divisions and the structuring of the team.

Kondapalli Aasritha

Aasritha was the Wet Lab Lead of the project and helped in the smooth functioning of the wet lab experiments. She was responsible for setting-up objectives for each week and scheduling the working hours of the wet lab members. She has worked on the cloning of the recovery plasmids and expression analysis of the surface-expressed lead-binding proteins.

Pratham Bansal

Pratham was the Fundraising Lead of the project and played an integral role in formalising associations with Biotech companies in India. He streamlined the outreach process to associate with governmental bodies and industries for the development of the project. He has also worked on developing an implementation strategy for the commercialisation of the project.

Aashita Gupta

Aashita was the Human Practices Lead for the project. She ideated and led awareness initiatives, surveys and set up stakeholder interactions. She also led education-based initiatives to develop a module on synthetic biology, facilitated introductory sessions in schools and held meetings with officials from educational boards to include synthetic biology in the curriculum.

Sarthak Singh Chauhan

Sarthak has acted as an interface between the wet lab and the dry lab divisions. He has contributed to the mathematical and structural modelling along with project ideation. He has also developed the education modules and introductory sessions for synthetic biology. Additionally, he has ideated and conducted the surveys. He has been an integral part of the dry lab and human practices divisions.

Prashita Saxena

Prashita has acted as the wet lab hands of the project. She was an integral part of the wet lab team for cloning of the recovery plasmids and did a lot of miscellaneous work like content writing, microfluidics, social media and outreach, and design. She has also helped ideate the project and in its smooth functioning.

Aayushi Agrawal

Aayushi has been involved in the wet lab and hardware aspects of the project. She has been involved in the cloning of the recovery plasmids along with the ideation of the microfluidic device and immobilisation strategies for the biosensor. She has also worked on translating our content to local Indian languages and helped develop the education modules.

Snigdha Malhotra

Snigdha has primarily been involved in the wet lab division and worked on cloning of the plasmids. She has ensured compliance with safety guidelines throughout the project’s wet lab experiments. She has also directed and produced the promotional video of the project.

J. Ajai

Ajai has worked in the wet lab division of the project. He has ordered consumables and inventory for the project when necessary. He has also set up interactions with stakeholders in human practices.

Shreyas Khedekar

Shreyas has worked in the wet lab division of the project. He has also developed introductory biology sessions for potential iGEM recruits for the team.

Harsh Saini

Harsh has been involved in the human practices division for facilitating and setting-up stakeholder interactions and for running the awareness drive. He has also worked on web development for the wiki.

Rehan Singh Dhaka

Rehan is the primary web developer of the team for the smooth construction of the wiki. He has also worked on inclusivity through the wiki by adding an audio conversion tool.

Sonali Kanwar Rathore

Sonali has been involved in the human practices division. She worked on the surveys and the setting up of educational sessions with schools and NGOs. She also worked on the social media and outreach of the project.

Ashwani Yadav and Sparsh Agarwal

They have contacted companies and governmental organisations for funding for the project. They have been integral to the marketing team and their contribution is invaluable to the project.

Ashish Choudhary

Ashish has been involved in the dry lab and human practices divisions of the team. He has contributed to the mathematical modelling and its documentation.

Jaskeen Singh

Jaskeen has worked in the dry lab division along with content writing for documentation of the project.

Financial Support

We thank Indian Institute of Technology Delhi for believing in our team and the project to fund our journey all throughout iGEM.

We are grateful to our sponsor, Premas Biotech Pvt. Ltd., for investing in our project and realising its potential at an early stage.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our lab managers, technicians and lab assistants, Mr Anish Raju, Dr Sumeet Kapoor, Mr Ashish Kumar and Mr Sanjay Kumar, for helping us every step of the way for the smooth functioning of the lab.

Vipul Kumar has been involved with the dry lab division. He helped us set up our structural modelling pipeline. He taught us how to use modelling software and gave crucial advice throughout the project.

Dheeraj Chaurasia has been involved with the dry lab division. He helped us execute lead-protein docking and advised us on using the existing literature effectively.

We also thank all lab members of RNA Lab I who have cooperatively allowed us to use their lab space and resources throughout the project.

We also thank our stakeholders for taking out the time for providing us with valuable and thoughtful inputs on our project which helped improve it every step of the way. How their inputs impacted our project can be found on the Integrated Human Practices page.