iGEM team members

The Brauer Group: Jeffrey worked with Benjamin Huang as part of the Brauer Group. They were in charge of the light regulation aspect of the WashU iGEM project. Ben and Jeffrey spent most of the summer cloning and testing the light regulated transcription elements.

Ben also spent a significant amount of time coding and making the team wiki page look pretty awesome. He did most of the coding for the site through self-learning of html and often sought Google for help involving web design elements. He did not use any outside resources or companies to code the site, but borrowed inspiration and snippets of code from previous iGEM teams: in particular 2013 WLC-Milwaukee, 2013 TMU-Tokyo, and 2012 WashU. He also began work on the kinetic model system of the light regulation system. He continued cloning work during the school year, when Jeffrey went abroad.

Jeffrey worked on managing the team, setting up meetings, and having conversations with the school administration and other iGEM teams. He also worked to create our team apparel.

The Rebstock Group: Caroline Focht worked with Richard Li as part of the Rebstock Group. They were in charge of the plasmid design and Nif activity testing aspect of the WashU iGEM project. Caroline and Richard spent most of their time in summer in protocol development and nitrogen fixation activity testing. They continued running experiments and biobricked during the school year.

Caroline also concentrated on WashU iGEM Outreach program, which produced numerous educational videos, and sought out other iGEM teams for collaborations. She also produced most of our logos and graphics for the website and presentations.

Richard was lab manger of iGEM at Washington University in St. Louis, thus in addition to the wet lab work he was also in charge of fundraising and securing for the project.

Attributions:

Dr. Himadri Pakrasi and Dr. Tae Seok Moon served as mentors during our iGEM project. We had a few meetings with them in order to present our project proposals and check on our progress updates, and helped to give us feedback and troubleshoot when necessary. They provided the funding for lab supplies.


Our team would not be complete without our list of direct advisors: Andrew Ng, Bert Berla, Cheryl Immethun, and Dr. Deng Liu.



Our Non-iGEM affiliated advisors worked in their respective labs and would help us on a daily basis, whether it giving valuable input on experimental or cloning protocols or feedback during our project presentations. The list includes:


At Monsanto, a group of scientists specializing in nitrogen fixation sat in on our team’s presentation about the outlook of our nitrogen fixation project and offered plenty of suggestions through the advisory panel meeting. The diagnostic panel meeting with scientists of Monsanto later proved to be productive for the design and procedure of the lab work.

Andrew Ng: Andrew also helped to create the list of kinetic equations for our model.

Brandon Nicklas: Brandon Nicklas is an undergraduate at Penn State; he helped us to design a kinetic model for our light regulation system.

Rajib Saha: Rajib is a PhD candidate at Penn State; he worked as a liaison between Penn State and WashU and guided Brandon and gave us feedback on the modeling.

Beyond the support of lab work design, Monsanto, and in particular Jose Prado, project lead of a paper published about how projects go from concept to market, provided human resources and materials including data sets, Power-point slides and presentations to enhance WashU’s iGEM video series.

Pakrasi Group: Dr. Pakrasi and his research group at Washington University in St. Louis provided material and working space support for both Rebstock and Brauer Group.

Moon Group: Dr. Moon and his research group provided material and working space support for the Brauer group.

Zhang Group: Dr. Zhang and his research group at Washington University in St. Louis provided material support when we were lacking certain chemicals and let us use their temperature controlled growth chamber in which we conducted our light regulation experiments.

Sigma-Aldrich has supported WashU iGEM program since 2012. This year, Tonya Jackson, the Product Manager of Genomics and Research, provided help by not only offering funding for our project, gave us feedback on our presentation, and also provided us a sample of a new prototype media “EnPresso B” to test and enhance growth of our colonies.

Monsanto’s sponsorship continued in 2014 through material and advisorial means. On Wednesday, June 4, our team was invited to visit Monsanto Headquarters and its affiliated facilities. The tour gave team members a terrific impression about industrial-sized biotechnology development procedure and growth capabilities.

WashU iGEM would like to thank Washington University School of Arts & Sciences, Washington University School of Engineering, Washington University Office of Undergraduate Research, Washington University International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability, Sigma-Aldrich and Monsanto for providing funding for stipends and materials. Lastly, we would like to thank SnapGene for their software to aid our plasmid designs.