Students Attributions

• Marta Marangoni, Zosteric Acid : Marta is one of our team captains. With her personality and dedication she lead, together with Alison, the team throughout the summer. She helped with the conceptualization of the subproject about Zosteric Acid as well as with the design of the primers and plasmids needed. In addition, she worked in the laboratory all the time leading the zosteric acid subproject, checked and provided laboratory supplies too. She presented our project at the Synbio conference in Zurich! She was also very involved with the Human Practices, by actively participating to meetings with experts and being involved in multiple interviews.
• Alison Gandelin, Zosteric Acid, FitD : Alison is the team captain alongside Marta. She worked on the project promotion video with all her soul and dedication. Alison was a strong presence who would always ensure to keep everything on track. She worked on the conceptualization of the subproject about Zosteric Acid. She also worked on FitD, mainly on laboratory experiments and mussels treatment, and minorly on the wiki design. She hosted a podcast on invasive species on radio, at the “Fréquence Banane” with Mehdi. Additionally, she is the team contact with UManitoba regarding our partnership.
• Emi Pedrazzi, FitD, Human Practices : Emi took to heart the idea of communicating the global problem of invasive species to a global audience. To do so, she created a whole book for children to help them understand the problem of invasive species. The book contains chapters about our team and our project, but also definitions, riddles, crosswords, and descriptions of invasive species in Switzerland. The book is translated into English, Italian, and French. She also translated a questionnaire into Italian for another iGEM team. Emi spent time in the laboratory and collected data during our experiments. She helped with the general organization and performed PCRs, and electrophoresis gels for the FitD project. She also communicated a lot with our assistants too to obtain relevant information and guidance when needed by the team. At the end of the summer, she cleaned the whole laboratory with Salomé. A true swiss-knife!
• Filippo Rey, Zosteric Acid : Filippo is one of our laboratory managers. He ensured that everything went smoothly in the laboratory. He is also a Quagga provider and often went to the lake to get some mussels for our experiments. Also, he worked on the needs of the mussels and designed some ways to keep them alive long enough for the experiments. In the first part of the project he helped design the primers for the Zosteric Acid subproject and in the last weeks of the project he also assisted the group responsible for FitD toxin during the testing on mussels.
• Douhan Wicht, Zosteric Acid, Wiki : He is a part of the subproject about Zosteric Acid and designed all of the primers for this part. During the summer, he first worked in the laboratory to build the plasmids for the production of zosteric acid and figured out what media was best for each of our strains of bacteria by creating growth curve plots in R. In the second part of the summer, apart from helping in the process of measuring how much zosteric acid our bacteria were producing, he mainly dedicated himself to the creation of the wiki and later the proofreading of all the wiki pages.
• Albane Schmid, FitD : One of our laboratory managers, she spent all of her summer in the laboratory, working on the Fit D toxin part. She did a lot of cloning experimentation and also helped with the mussel tests. In the first steps of the project, she helped with the conceptualization and the background research. She also contributed to the design of our plasmids and primers. Furthermore, she translated our project promotion video into German and helped present our project at the ISME conference.
• Jérémy Berger, FitD : He, too, passed all of his summertime in the laboratory. He is one of our lab managers and often stayed late to finish experiments with the Fit D toxin. In the early days, he worked on the conceptualization of the project and engineered some plasmids for FitD. He was responsible for the data curation, especially in the production of the Fit D toxin. He also often devoted himself to harvesting mussels in the lake.
• Mehdi Naiah, FitD, DJ : Mehdi is our treasurer, so he always made sure that we got our money back. He worked on the FitD project from beginning to end and took over some experiments for the ZA even though he wasn’t originally a part of this project. He helped Emi with the kids’ book : he wrote some species sheets and also the page about DNA and genome. He wrote and presented the podcast at “Fréquence Banane” with Alison. In addition, he participated in the blogs’ collaboration with Chalmers-Gothenburg by doing an article about insulin. Mehdi also helped with the primers and plasmids design. Moreover, he often devoted himself to getting quaggas in the lake for our experiments. Finally, he also participated in the ISME18 presentation of our iGEM project. He is also our DJ and always blasted music in the laboratory to cheer us up!
• Rosalie Marguerat, Human Practices, Blog : Rosalie helped the team to communicate with the rest of the world by being on time with social media posts and outreach activities. She wrote and posted on our blog, „The transcriptome“, with Chalmers-Gothenburg’s team. She often went by the lake to retrieve Quaggas for the laboratory. She managed the collaboration part on behalf of our team and ensured smooth communications with other teams. She participated in the elaboration of the species portraits for the collaboration with “La maison de la rivière”. She also took care of our team's equipment.
• Salomé Ifergan, Human Practices : Salomé is also our communication officer. Together with Rosalie, she connected the team with social networks. Salomé is responsible for promoting blog articles on Instagram. She also worked on the promotional video along with Alison. Salomé also helped at the beginning of the summer with the anti-fouling project and with the kid's book at the end of the summer, when she also took part in the wiki and helped to design the pages for a better look!
• Cindy Ramel, Human Practices, Quagga : Cindy is an outreach officer. She worked in collaboration with « La maison de la Rivière » for the exposition. Also, she helped with the writing of the children’s book with Emi, correcting it. She contacted teachers to promote it. She drew the first draft of the logo. Cindy also studied the various conditions necessary to keep the mussels alive in the lab and to observe their attachment to surfaces. She wrote all the main protocols needed for the lab.
• Julie Tschanz, Human Practices, Wiki : Julie is involved in establishing human practice projects and as one of our webmasters. She first worked on the project's conceptualization with the human practice part, deciding who to call and what to do to make our project known. She then dedicated herself to the design of the logo. During the second part of the summer, she mainly worked on the wiki writing and styling.
• Adrien Burki, FitD : Adrien was our most dedicated lab worker. He designed our plasmids and primers for the FitD project with Jérémy. He participated in the cloning of the different plasmids into E. coli and then into P. protegens. He did many PCRs, clean-ups, minipreps, nanodrops, and so on ! Our most important lab force !
• Leïla Ouhamma, Human Practices, Secretary : She is our secretary and took care of the administrative part on our behalf. She organized our trip to Paris for the Jamboree. She also participated in the Human Practices team by contacting outside people needed to keep the project moving forward, and other people to help and advise us. She often participated in zoom meetings with other teams we collaborated with and ensured smooth communication with them, especially when organizing the SynBio conference. As she is keen on mathematics, she worked with Albane to develop a useful model for our project. She developed a slight talent for writing while contributing to the blog's perpetuation. She also joined the Wiki team at the end to fine-tune some final details. Working with mussels is not an easy task, therefore she worked on how to keep them alive from the very beginning and on the final concentration test experiments.