We would like to acknowledge and extend our heartfelt gratitude to the following people and groups for lending us valuable supports throughout our project year. We could not have accomplished what we have done with your help and guidance.

Overall

Thank you to the Department of Biology and Faculty of Science from the University of Waterloo for providing us with our new laboratory. We are excited to use it for the next project year!

Special thanks to Dr Trevor Charles for continuing to provide the team with laboratory space as we made this transition and for supporting the team since its beginning in the iGEM competition.

We would also like to thank our faculty advisors; Dr. Brian Ingalls, Dr. Trevor Charles, Dr. Barb Moffatt, Dr. Marc Aucoin and Dr. Andrew Doxey and our grad advisors for helping us with the design of the project and giving us insightful feedbacks and suggestions.

Lab and Design

• All members of the Charles' lab at University of Waterloo, Department of Biology for your continuous support and guidance for the last few years.
• Dr. Jeffery Bose from University of Kansas (KUMC), Dr. Kenneth Bayles and Jennifer Endres from University of Nebraska (NUMC) for providing us pJB38 and other related parts, and the sequences of YFP, DsRed, spC and aadD genes. Thank you for also providing guidance to our knowledge of integrating YFP into our S.epidermidis host.
• Dr. Timothy Foster from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, for providing us with the E. coli strain DC10B that has the appropriate methylation system that can facilitate transformation of Staphylococcus.
• Karen Miinch and Gracia Murase for providing us with S.epidermidis strain.
• Christopher Randall from Dr Alex O’Neill’s lab at the University of Leeds (U.K.) for pGO1 plasmid and advice on propagating the plasmid in S. aureus.
• Dr. Niels Bols, Dr. John Pham, and Dr.Nathan Vo from Bols' lab for helping us using the fluorescent plate reader.
• Dr. Niles Patrick Donegan from the Ambrose Lab in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth for providing the xylose inducible promoter and relaying the corresponding literature.
• Dr. Sang Yup Lee from Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) for providing us guidance on how to design sRNA constructs.
• Dr. Michael Murphy and Angele from University of British Columbia, Department of Microbiology and Immunology for sending us S.aureus strain Newman.

  Mathematical Modeling

  We would like to thank Dr. Brian Ingalls and Dr. Matthew Scott for their outstanding continued support.

  Human Practices & Outreach

  • The Quantum Nano Centre at the University of Waterloo for providing an appropriate laboratory space for us to host the Shad Valley workshop.
  • The Department of Chemistry from the University of Waterloo NE224L course for making available the activities that we used to standardize the Bacterial Transformations workshop.
  • Dr. Marianna Foldvari from the University of Waterloo School of Pharmacy for direction in understanding the ingredients of a topical medication using bacteria, and offering related literature.