Team:DTU-Denmark/Team/Attributions

Overview

Several months of brainstorming, discussions and literature search as well as meetings with different faculty members from the Technical University of Denmark resulted in a joint decision on working on the Spinach project. The initial idea about measuring promoter activities in absolute terms originates from one of our team members, Kristian Jensen, and Chris Workman hinted us about the Spinach concept. The obvious applicability of the project and huge potential has been a main driving force for all of us during the project.

The formation of our team was facilitated by Chris Workman, but the project management, planning, fundraising as well as the designs, work described on this wiki, our results and the submitted BioBricks were done by ourselves. Nevertheless, we owe thanks to several people for constructive feedback, advice, guidance and for encouraging our work as well as for providing us space in their laboratories.

Students

Initially we divided the team into different subgroups created with regard to our competences at the time of our competence session and personal intentions for gaining new skills. Due to this subdivision, the contributions of each member is greatly reflected by the subgroups each of us has participated in during the project. The members of the different subgroups are as follows:

A couple of students who were part of the initial phase of the project should receive a special thanks.

• Anders Bech Bruntse, was of great help in proofreading funding applications resulting in full financing of our project and trip to Boston.
• Casper Nørskov Enghuus, took part in the initial fundraising process and also took part in the initial lab phase.
• Georgi Dimitrov created the spinach iGEM logo.

Advisors

Our advisors have advised us and provided constructive feedback as well as professional discussions, when this was needed and we owe every one of them thanks.

Especially we owe Kristian Davidsen thanks for his practical help during the project. Kristian has provided both ‘emergency’ lab help and tips and tricks for PCR. Furthermore Kristian was of great help during our BioBrick workshop.

Hilde Coumou has helped in the initial phase of our Policy & Practice work. She has introduced us to different communication strategies and how to optimise science communication, which has helped us in defining a strategy for streamlining our outreach initiatives as well as choosing our target group.

Helen Cook helped us set up the BioBrick workshop and has kindly answered all kinds of immediate questions throughout the project period.

In addition to helping us with the scientific aspects of our project and the experimental planning, Jan Martinussen and Mogens Kilstrup have opened up their lab to us so we could use their equipment for measuring fluorescence.

Ali Altintas has helped us throughout our experimental work with the BioLector, as well as with interpreting our results throughout the project. Furthermore Ali gave us the initial safety introduction to the laboratory.

Anne Egholm Pedersen has introduced us to fluorometry and helped with our flow cytometry measurements.

Acknowledgements

We are very thankful for the help and guidance that we have received from other faculty members than our own supervisors, such as

• Sébastien Muller, for advice on work with in vitro transcription.
• Martin Kogle provided us with competent E. coli DH5α.
• Regina Schürmann, for helping out with laboratory facilities during the BioBrick workshop.
• Marzanna Pulka-Amin, for materials in the laboratory
• Marlene Dalgaard, for advice and materials for in vitro transcription.

Other iGEM Teams

During the summer an ethic workshop was hosted by the University of Copenhagen iGEM team, the outcome of the workshop can be seen here, and we are very grateful to have been invited.

Laboratories

Most of our experiments were carried out at Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS) at DTU Systems Biology located at the Technical University of Denmark. Here we were invited to use their machines to perform our molecular work and measurements.

Part of the work was carried out at Metabolic Signaling and Regulation and Infection Microbiology at DTU Systems Biology. Here we used the fluorescence microscope and fluorometer to investigate our cultures, which was a great help during the project and we used the flow cytometer to measure fluorescence at cellular level.

Literature

Dr. Samie Jaffrey from Department of Pharmacology, Weill Medical College, Cornell University, was of great help, and provided us the specific sequences of their Spinach-construct which later on made the foundation for our quantification of promoter strengths.