Team Contributions
Gregorio Nepomuceno Queiroz
Gregorio was the Student Leader for our project and was lead of the Design sub-team. He introduced the idea of joining iGEM to the department and recruited members at the start. He coordinated the Brainstorming phase, setting up meetings and organizing how ideas would be put forward. He later divided the group into sub-teams and nominated leads for each one. He then participated in the experimental design, specifically assisting in deciding on the chassis used, and helped to clone the phosphate biosensor, malate biosensor, phosphate release circuit and CRISPR deletion plasmids. In Outreach, he gave a series of talks, collaborated with other teams (lead the partnership with BioBrussels doing most of the writing for the “Guide for Future Teams” on the UniofBath side), participated in discussions with industry experts for Integrated Human Practices and worked on our Instagram account. For Design, he was responsible for designing our logo, making some of the visuals for the social media pages and working on our educational leaflet.
Noah Shriever
Noah was a member of the Wet Lab sub team. He helped during the brainstorming and conceptualisation phase of the project, completing literature reviews and also presented an idea at the faculty meeting. His role in the Wet Lab team involved knocking out the GlpQ gene in WT Bacillus subtilis w168 with the help of Jazz (following his protocol and using his CRISPR plasmid). He also helped with general lab maintenance, maintaining LB agar and LB broth stocks, as well as miniprepping plasmid stocks for Gregorio. He was also a star actor for the promotional video.
Olivia Sandys-Lumsdaine
Olivia worked on the Outreach sub-team, overseeing the design of surveys and ensuring public engagement activities were ethical. Olivia oversaw design of surveys on the problem of phosphate depletion, phosphate pollution and environmental release of genetically engineered bacteria. Olivia tailored these surveys to match their audience, be they the general public or farmers.
Jeremy Boyle
Jeremy helped lead project ideation, conducting thorough background research to identify problems for the team to tackle and propose potential solutions, weighing up their novelty and practical feasibility. Jeremy lead the Outreach sub-team, preparing and giving presentations for talks, appearing on podcasts, curating social media and infographics, producing the promotional video and representing the team on collaborations such as the Bioethics Virtual Symposium, where safety and policy regarding project implementation was researched and discussed. Simultaneously, he worked on administrative tasks such as the Wiki and wrote successful grant applications. Jeremy coordinated Integrated Human Practices, finding contacts in farming, business and academia, setting up interviews and feeding back insights to the team for incorporation in project design. Jeremy also worked on cloning the phosphate uptake NOT gates into E. coli as a part of the Wet Lab team.
Martine Tran
Martine researched how PhoBac could be implemented in wastewater treatment systems and contributed an engineering perspective to group meetings.
James Doran
James worked on the Modelling sub-team, developing the code to fit the ODE model to the data from the malate and phosphate sensors and producing the plots. He also was involved in the Outreach sub-team, recommending potential local stakeholders that could be contacted as part of the project.
Tudor Ciurca
Tudor helped to the coding of the Wiki, including putting up content on the Wiki as well as implementing design by writing custom CSS.
Jazz Ghataora
Jazz was responsible for the conceptualisation and design of all genetic circuits implemented within Bacillus subtilis, in addition to helping set up the lab and leading and coordinating the Wet Lab division of the iGEM team. Simultaneously, as a trained Bacillus subtilis Synthetic Biologist, Jazz proposed the initial idea of using Bacillus subtilis as a chassis, and was responsible for supervising and instructing other Wet Lab members in microbial techniques, molecular cloning, genetic circuit design, providing protocols and assaying the functionality of circuits built by other iGEM Wet Lab members, including Sunny, Jeremy, Gregorio and Noah. As an assistant to Sunny, Jazz also helped with collating data for the hydroponics “Moonrock” experiment. He also was a star actor for the promotional video.
Adam Mohamed Khan
Adam helped the Outreach team in engaging the National Farmers Union to promote PhoBac.
Ankur Saxena
Ankur lead funding and entrepreneurship activities, which involved sending emails, soliciting angel investors, creating investor presentations and outlining future revenue streams.
Alexz Farrall
Alexz was the project administrator and lead of the Dry Labs sub-team. Through software and hardware means, Alexz was a key contributor in the conceptualization, investigation and visualization of a portable phosphorous detection device and interface. Moreover, Alexz provided mentorship to all internal and outreach (including other teams) activities and provided guidance towards methodological, analytical, and safety practices.
Sofia Radrizziani
Sofia was a member of the Outreach sub-team. She focused on identifying potential events to which the University of Bath iGEM team could participate in order to promote education and collaboration. By organising talks at Discover Bath and Bath’s International Summer School, she helped the team target high school and undergraduate students to teach them about iGEM, synthetic biology and our project. She also arranged for the team to deliver a presentation and gain insights on past iGEM teams from PhD students at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Lastly, she organised a lecture at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution aimed at raising awareness on the phosphorous depletion issue and sustainable farming amongst the general public.
Other Contributors
Diparati Sen
Diparati was a member of the Design sub-team. She was responsible for social media management for the official Instagram account, from designing the posts to posting them. Being a master’s student of Human Computer Interaction discipline, she was also the UX designer for the Wiki and was responsible for creating the wireframes and multiple iterations of prototypes in Figma for the Wiki.
Ivan Cheltsov
Ivan worked with James develop an ODE model to predict malate concentration from RLU output.
Gemma Bavista
Gemma contributed to brainstorming discussions during ideation.
Kate Willoughby
Kate designed our mascot Phoby and made charming illustrations.
Supervisor
Momna Hejmadi
Momna recruited members, provided invaluable guidance to the team and the team leader throughout. She additionally helped the team secure internal funding and promoted the team at every opportunity to the University community.
Advisors and Instructors
Yui (Sunny) Lao
Sunny was the advisor to the Bath’s iGEM project. In particularly he came up with the idea of the hydroponics “Moonrock” experiment setup and provided technical support on the designing experiments required handling of plant materials. He also offered the total phosphate test kits for a reference system to the PhoBac phosphate system which greatly facilitates the project and allows a more realistic goal to be set. With the help of Jazz, the plan for the “Moonrock” experiment was materialized.
Dr. Volkan Cevik
Volkan provided feedback and advice during Project Ideation and Brainstorming.
Special Thanks to:
Dr. Neil Brown
Neil provided feedback and advice during Project Ideation and Brainstorming.
Prof. Susanne Gebhard
Susanne provided all plasmids and strains utilised by the iGEM team throughout the project.
Pamela Sans Nique
Pamela provided lab access, equipment and safety training to the team
Dr. Zoe Burk
Zoe helped us secure consumables and reagents for our project.
Dr. David Tosh, Prof. Adele Murrell
David and Adele provided funding and consumables to the team.
Without the support of all of these amazing people, our project would not have been possible. Thank You!