Team:Berlin diagnostX/Attributions

Attributions

We achieved incredible things during this intense time - iGEM gave us an aim to work towards to, but we are only at the beginning of our journey.
As we are the first iGEM Team from the Berlin Charité University hospital, we started with no infrastructure at all - a great challenge and opportunity at the same time.

Special thanks & attributions go to:

  • Prof. Schülke, our primary PI, and his lab at the NeuroCure Clinical Research Center of Charité Universitätsmedizin. Thank you for your patience and giving us the opportunity to to carry out this project in your lab. We greatly appreciate your help in the analysis of the tapeworm transcriptome data and writing applications for grants and for the Institutional Review Board. Without your continuous support in administrative challenges and constructive scientific feedback, our progress would not have been possible. We hope to continue the project with you and would be happy to steer the development process towards a spin out company.
  • Prof. Kramer, our secondary PI and his working group located on the same floor as the Schuelke Lab. Thank for the fruitful discussions on immobilization of cell free expression systems on membranes. Furthermore we want to thank his group for their patience when sharing a kitchen with our team and for helping us out with cells and reagents we borrowed from time to time.
  • Prof. Volk for his help in preparing discussions with other institute leaders and for critical review of our progress. We hope to continuously rely on your support in the future challenges in realizing our diagnostic platform.
  • Furthermore we want to thank Florian Uhlitz for allowing us to use his RNA analysis pipeline for target discovery and Marjan Faizi for helping us with the evaluation of potential sensor sequences.
  • We want to thank Jakub Bartoszewicz and Melania Nowicka for introducing Jonathan to NUPACK and writing his first script with him.
  • Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Shruti Nagvanshi, Shabana Khan, Shiv Pratap Chaubey, Mangla Prasad Rajbhar and Bablu Ram from the human rights organization PVCHR for their generous hospitality and admiring will to improve the situation of the discriminated and poor. In particular, we would like to thank for helping us understand the situation of people affected by the parasite, for giving us insights into the work of social workers and activists and, finally, for supporting the project by identifying and screening the first villages with potential infestations with tapeworms.
  • Dr. Dilip Mishra from Heritage Institute of Medical Sciences, Dr. Anoop K Srivastava from Pt.Deendayal Government Hospital,Varanasi and Dr. D.P. Singh from Pt.Deendayal Government Hospital, Varanasi for supplying us with T. solium samples, characterizing the samples and for managing the interaction with laboratories that prepared the samples for us.
  • Kshitij Raj and Tarun Mahajan from IIT Delhi for setting up a RNA isolation pipeline together with us, for helping us exporting the RNA samples and for being wonderful hosts in India and productive partners to collaborate within this transcontinental research project.
  • Katrin Renk for drawing the tapeworm image on our front page
  • Frieda Zimmer for her support on our trip to India.
  • Peter Grabitz for inspiring discussions on Open Access and visualization of our targets as an interactive network.
  • The entire team of the Sequencing Core Facility of the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics Berlin for their fast and professional processing of our sensitive and rare RNA samples that enabled an analysis of the tapeworm transcriptome data within a record time. Additionally, we would like to thank Dr. Daniel Ibrahim and Prof. Stefan Mundlos, director of the Institute for Human and Medical Genetics, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Virchow Hospital and group leader at the Max-Plank-Institute for Molecular Genetics, for connecting us to the named core facility.