Team:Toulouse/Acknowledgements/Attributions

Our team is proud to say that we almost did all the work on our own: finding sponsors, making communication tools about our project, finding the protocols to use and optimize them. However, we needed occasional assistance during our project, therefore we required help from different people: scientists, administrators, specialists and even lay persons. We would like to warmly thank all these persons for their contribution and support. Our project moved forward because they offered their help.

Ulule: a crowdfunding website

Ulule is the first European crowdfunding website. We have posted our SubtiTree project on this site to collect funds for paying the Giant Jamboree fee. The collect was successful: we had 53 supporters and € 1,787 collected!

We warmly thank all the supporters, it was very encouraging to see that people mobilized for us!

We would like to thank:

Debra Baker, François Barbeau, Valérie Chataigner, Brune Couffignal, Serge Couffignal, Jacques de Grenier, Guillaume Debar, Colas Decloitre, Caroline Delabre, Charlene Douard, Laurence Fournié, Rose Fournié, Chrystelle Gaucher, Nicolas Gilet, Aurélie Gosseau, Sarah Guiziou, Carole Jouve, Damien Kanitzer, Pierre Lagoutte, Anne-Marie Lang, Myriam Le Nours, Julie Mabille, Mylène Manière, Eddy Manière, Stéphanie Marty, Nathan Mirassou, Pierre Mirassou, Sophie Molina, Raymond Molina, Eric Molina, Ngoc Thu Hang Pham, Bruno Paci, Frédéric Paletou, Nicolas Perez, Jean Perron, Pierre Pettera, Lucas Picault, Nathalie Pineau, Elodie Prattico, Florence Rigaud, Marianne et Dominique Serres, Gilles Truan, Clémence Witzmann.

Scientists

iGEM instructors

First of all, we warmly thank our amazing instructor: Gilles Truan. He was with us from the beginning to the end and even more! He is the master of cloning. He is the captain of PCR. Moreover, he knows how to grill sausages better than anyone! We kindly thank all the other instructors that helped us when we were lost with the scientific part or stressed by the lack of money. We especially thank Brice Enjalbert, Florence Bordes, Kaymeuang Cam, Magali Remaud-Siméon, Philippe Soucaille, Stéphane Guillouet, Isabelle Meynial-Salles and Alain Marty. Your advice and encouragements were very precious to us, and you deserve these thanks for all the energy you spent answering our questions (and we know that we are very energy-consuming!). To finish, a special thanks to Claude Maranges, who helped us a lot with the sponsoring aspect and all the administrative problems that we encountered. Indeed, if you have any administrative issue, he is able to solve it in less than 2 minutes (5 minutes during the holidays)! He knows how to make everything smooth in record time.

Bacillus subtilis specialists

Even if Bacillus subtilis is a gram-positive bacterium model, none of our instructors ever worked with it. It is why we asked other people's help when we had questions about B. subtilis. We would like to thank Nathalie Campo for her advice about B. subtilis culture, her encouragements and her kindness. Her friend Thierry Doan helped us too: he brilliantly answered our questions about B. subtilis. We also thank Sarah Guiziou, iGEMer of the 2013 Toulouse team, for her advice and her protocols.

Fungi specialists

We are grateful to Christophe Roux who gave us two non-pathogenic strains of fungi: Aspergillus brasiliensis, Trichoderma reesei, Aspergillus nidulans and Chaetomium globusum. We used them to test our SubtiTree system. We deeply thank Sylvain Raffaele and Marielle Barascud for their ENORMOUS help at the end of the project. They took time to inject Subtitree in Nicotiana Benthamiana, setting up the ultimate and most valuable proof for our system (see Results). May the force be with them forever...

Other iGEM teams

Since several parts that we wanted to use were not in the iGEM kit plates, we asked iGEM teams to send us some parts:
- Thanks to the iGEM Warsaw team, especially Radoslaw Stachowiak, for sending us the biobricks BBa_K780000, BBa_K780001, BBa_K780002 and BBa_K780003.
- Thanks to the iGEM Utah State team, especially Charles Miller, for sending us the biobrick BBa_K1162001.
- Thanks to the iGEM Munich team, especially Jara Radek, for sending us the biobrick BBa_K823021, BBa_K823022 and BBa_K823023.

Lab support

Thanks to Sylvie Cancel and Yves Dutruy, lab technicians, for helping us when we did not know where to find Yeast Extract or how to use the new refrigerated centrifuge. They were with us as soon as we began the manipulations and they answer to all our questions.
A special thank to Patrick Chekroun, talended glass blower, for making the tubes system used in Chemotaxis tests (See Experimental results.
To finish, thanks to Fabien Albert, storeman of the LISBP, for his sympathy and his availability.

Press

A lot of different local newspapers were interested in SubtiTree. In this part, we would like to thank all the journalists that came to meet us:
- Hélène Ménal for her article in the newspaper 20 Minutes
- Philippe Font for his article in the newspaper Metronews
- Bernard Davodeau for his article in the newspaper La Dépêche
- Delphine Russeil for her article in the newspaper La Voix du Midi
- Angélique Mangon and Jack Levé for their television report on the channel France 3 Midi-Pyrénées
- Philip Hemme for his article about the French iGEM teams on the website LaBiotech.fr
- Olivier Schlama for his article in the newspaper Midi Libre
- Virginie Brancotte for her article in the newspaper Fluvial

Ethics

We thank Vincent Grégoire-Delory, responsible of the ethics platform at Toulouse White Biotechnology, for coming to our lab and sharing his huge knowledge with us around pizzas and a good bottle of wine! He suggested us several points to deepen our ethical reflection.

Design and Communication

We thank the INSA Toulouse Communication Department for giving us INSA Toulouse goodies and helping us with the organization of our acknowledgment day.
Thanks to Hélène Cabanac, graphic designer, for her help with the design of our presentation and our poster.
Thanks to the web designer Adrien Nicod for accepting to work with us and being patient with the remarks that each team member was saying!

Special thanks

We warmly thank Didier Combes, Nick Lindley , Pierre Monsan and Nicolas Combébiac for their support and their efficiency in the face of our administrative problems.
A special thanks to Gilbert Chauvel for his interest into our project and his valuable support.
A special thanks to Matthieu Arlat for giving us a lot of good advice, helping us with the sponsoring part and his enthusiasm.
To finish, thanks to the God of Synthetic Biology for giving us such results!

Premises

We would like to thank the INSA de Toulouse for hosting us during the whole summer (and even more actually!).

Us

And finally, we thank... us. For being in the lab all the summer, for our devotion to the plane trees, for the perseverance in the bad days and for putting up each other.
Therefore thanks to the entire team for this wonderful and exciting project!
We would like to thank also our mums and dads because without them we would not be there and thus the project would not have been done! And also the mum and dad of our mums and dads and the mum and dad of the mum and dad of our mums and dads and... you should get it!!