Attribution

The team leads, Shirin and Giovanni, were highly involved in the conception of the idea, as such they established key goals for the different subgroups part of the project (dry lab, wet lab, human practices and partnership) in order to achieve a proof of concept with a clear implementation plan. Both were involved in the development of the experimental design and day-to-day management of the lab. They also lead funding efforts of the team. Giovanni, Shirin, Alessandro were the primary individuals who worked on Catalyse, FonsMAD and i2i competitions and Impact Grant.

Giovanni coordinated communication between the wet-lab and dry-lab to ensure the work of each subgroup was feeding that of the other, and that all was in line with the primary goals of the project. Shirin on the other hand, worked more closely with the HP subgroup, guiding their initiatives by introducing helpful frameworks and communicating with stakeholders. Shirin was also the primary writer for the PoC grant.

Alessandro contributed extensively to foundraising initiatives, while taking charge of the wet-lab orthogonal germination aspect, devising sporulation and germination methods and the screening pipeline. At later stages, he was also greatly involved with the final steps of the chitinase display system cloning and transformation in B.subtilis. Emese collaborated with him on the orthogonal germination aspect of the project. She was also the lead from the Imperial group in the partnership project.

Cris was a key member in the wet-lab, working on cloning aspects as well as experimentation required for the partnership. Youzi supported him in the endeavour. Also contributing to the organization of the UK iGEM Meetup and writing of the Impact Grant. Kitty worked in wet lab as well, completed the interlab experiment and helped with other aspects when needed.

Fontaine coordinated execution of HP initiatives from visiting farmers, conducting surveys and organizing a booth at the Exhibition Road Festival. Anvita and Allegra contributed to HP work in the project. Whilst Tairan focused on the write-up for our Supporting Entrepreneurship work, and editing of the promotional video.

Marc, Freya, Jay and Rasmus worked on the dry lab. All worked on germinant receptor modelling. Marc and Rasmus developed our novel software tool, whilst Freya and Jay worked on the fusion protein design and microbiome modeling. Marc led the coding of the wiki and contributed to editing of the team promotional video as well. Kitty provided support with animations.

Acknowledgements

We would like to sincerely thank all the people who have advised us:

• Dr. Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, our primary PI, who supported us from the very beginning of the project, guiding us through the different stages of our project
• Dr. Joaquin Caro Astorga, our secondary PI, who is the creator of the SubtiToolkit which we have used extensively in our project
• Prof. Geoff Baldwin for his expert supervision as part of our participation in FoNS-MAD, and providing us with a lab space over the summer
• Prof. Graham Christie, for meeting with us several times providing us much needed expert advice on how to work with and engineer spores, as well as graciously providing us with the Ger3 B. subtilis strain
• Prof. David Rudner, for providing us feedback on our idea and advice on how to improve our experimental design, as well as shipping us a strain
• Prof. Gholamreza Ahmadian for sharing constructs built by his research team for chitinase display of spores
• Prof. Juan F. Quijano for sharing constructs built by his research team
• Prof. Peter Setlow for providing us with guidance at the early stages of our project for receptor engineering
• Mohamed Almarei for always being there providing expertise as we troubleshooted experiments in the lab
• Lea Bernier who granted us use of the microfluidic device she has been developing as part of the her PhD for the spore imaging
• Georg Watcher, for advising us when we first formed the group and giving us direction since then
• Felix Richter and the Claire Stanley lab for providing us with T. rossicum and R. solani strains and guiding us on how to use the same
• David Featherbee, Colin Campbell, Elina Zalite for helping us organize lab space, materials, reagents and resolving technical difficulties
• Dr Suhail Islam for giving us access to a server, solving several of our IT problems, providing access to software tools and advising with the DryLab project