ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

General support

Marie-France Radigois helped us with the administrative tasks related to the project.

André Pexieder let us use his lab for our project.

Celia Lutherbacher helped us polish the documentation.

Mayumi Hamada started the project with us; she participated in the brainstorming part of the project.

Içvara Barbier helped us for the brainstorming part of the project, participated in our meetings during the summer and occasionally came to help us in the lab.

Stéphane Karlen, Safety coordinator at the School of Life Science, gave us a course on laboratory safety before our project started and was available for any question during the project.

Jean Mauron from Graphein enterprise helped us for the realisation of the sweaters and T-shirts.

John McKinney and Jan van der Meer helped us think about biosafety issues in microfluidics.

Laboratory techniques

Arne Seitz and José Artacho taught us how to use the microscopes at EPFL's Bioimaging and Optics Facility

Marc Chambon taught us how to use the plate readers at EPFL's Biomolecular Screening Facility.

We were trained at CMI, the Center of MicroNano Technology at EPFL, on the different clean room processes we needed to know to make the masks and wafers for our microfluidic chips. You can find more information on EPFL's center of micronanotechnology here.

Francesco Piraino, Henrike Niederholtmeyer and Francesca Volpetti taught us the basics of autoCAD designing and microfluidic chip fabrication.

Luisa Spisak from the iGEM EPFL 2013 team helped us to start the project by teaching us basic lab techniques.

Yeast handling and transformation techniques

Viesturs Simanis and Andrea Krapp helped us a lot to begin the yeast part of the project. They clarified many points regarding yeast transformations and gene regulation in S. cerevisiae. They confirmed the feasibility of our project and validated the constructs we had designed.

Jean-Daniel Feuz, working in our advisor Bart Deplancke's lab, gave us the ym4271 yeast strain as well as several protocols for yeast selective and unselective medium preparation.

Collaboration

Stephen Michnick and Jacqueline Kowarzyk sent us their split IFP plasmids, which we extensively used to test CpxR dimerization.

Stavroula Hatzios, Postdoc in Professor Waldor's laboratory sent us her renilla luciferase plasmids with CheY/CheZ, which helped us test the luminescence.

Human practices support

Yann Heurtaux, Clément Epié, and Nicolas Loubet, are co-founders of biohackerspaces in France and Switzerland. They sought us out and came to visit, leading to presentations about iGEM and our project at the Hackuarium in Lausanne.

Fabien Goubet is a journalist for "Le Temps" newspaper. He came to visit us at EPFL and wrote an article about our project.

Yves Deluz, general director of the high schools from Canton de Vaud, sent us 4 classes of high school students for a day of discovery of synthetic biology at EPFL.

Françoise Bezençon, Fabio Moriggia, Jean-Pierre Lardet and Nabil Mastour, high school biology teachers, collaborated with us and came with their students for the visit at EPFL.

Talya Saladino, Beatriz Camba, Valérie Jacot-Descombes and Céline Chable from Mediacom Events helped us with the logistics for the Human Practices events on campus.

Clara Marc from the Study Programs Promotion at EPFL introduced us to the swiss German highschool class from Bern and let us present our project to the students

Sponsors

EPFL is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland. This school was founded with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, to be a national center of excellence in science and technology and to provide a hub for interaction between the scientific community and industry. It is our main sponsor.

Microsynth is a European leader in offering services related to synthesis of DNA/RNA oligonucleotides, various kinds of DNA/RNA analyses and molecular biology project outsourcing.

Nikon is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in optics and imaging products, including cameras, camera lenses, binoculars, microscopes, ophtalmic lenses, measurement instruments, etc.

Novartis is a Swiss multinational pharmaceutical compagny based in Basel, Switzerland, ranking number one in sales amog the world-wide industry in 2013.

F. Hoffmann-La Roche is a Swiss global health-care compagny hearquartered in Basel, Switzerland, that operates worldwide under two divisions : Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics.

SnapGene is a molecular biology software that offers a fast and easy way to plan, visualize and document molecular biology procedures.