Team:REC-CHENNAI/Attributions
ATTRIBUTIONS
Being our first attempt at iGEM, we are eternally grateful to everyone who had been involved with our project since its inception. Their support and guidance was the driving force that kept us moving forward through this journey. Our special thanks to the chairperson of our college, Dr. (Mrs) Thangam Meganathan, Mr. Abhay Shankar, our principal Dr. S.N Murugesan, and the administrative officers Mr. Thiagarajan, Mr. Balaji and Mr. Tamizhselvan for funding our project and supporting us in this endeavor.
Jayasree Ma'am, the Head of the Department of Biotechnology, and Johanna ma'am, the Dean, have been our strong pillars of support throughout this journey. When we were initially taking our baby steps towards iGEM, they were on our side, constantly motivating us and have always pushed us to do better. They are the backbone of our team.
We are sincerely thankful to all the teachers, scholars and lab assistants from our department for imparting us with knowledge, providing us with safety training and helping us in lab at all times of the day (and night).
As our primary PI, Babuskin sir has been right with us from our initial brainstorming sessions, where he was instrumental in deciding our project, to the final stages. With numerous friends in the scientific community, sir put us in contact with a lot of scientists and research scholars, who helped us mould our idea to what it is today.
Gayathri ma’am has been more than a PI to us. For anything gone right or wrong, she was the first person that we all would contact and report to. She has basically been with us with every step of the way. Hence it wouldn’t be too much to say that she knew us the best and thus guided us the best.
Apart from being an amazing instructor, Sujata ma’am is an excellent bioinformatician. She verified our lab protocols and helped us design our parts and model structures of our peptides
We are sincerely thankful to Carolina for being our mentor. She has helped us in many things like troubleshooting our results, finalizing our project idea, preparing our presentation for the Giant Jamboree and so on. Thank god for Skype and Gmail, we were showered with her constant care and support. We are definitely looking forward to meeting her at Boston.
As our advisor, Shreenidhi was responsible for giving the day to day instructions to the team along with keeping a check on the work done. We also called her a walking calendar because she was the one most responsible one amongst all of us who reminded us of the deadlines and made sure that we stayed on track.
Also an advisor, Sriram mainly dealt with trouble shooting our results during the course of the project (hence called the handy-man of the team). He was also responsible for some serious brainstorming sessions that helped us to eventually finalize our project idea.
Although all of us worked hard day and night to complete our project, Vijay, Shravan and Sai Shyam were in charge of planning the work schedules well ahead and ensuring that everything runs smoothly. Rakshana and Roja on the other hand never failed to ensure that we were all adhering to the lab rules. They made sure that the lab was always kept tidy.
The human practices team was led by Preethi who diligently worked hard herself but made sure that the other HP team members - Akash, Ramya , Srimathi, Veenah, Marcia and Nishka worked even harder. They were responsible for organising Biofair and various workshops that helped spread awareness about iGEM, synthetic biology and our project. Apart from this, this team also managed the collaborations.
Completing our inter lab study was not an easy task. The perseverance of Sreya, Ashwin, Saranya and Vasavi helped us finish and submit our results on time. They were in-charge of managing the inter lab studies and worked very hard, never once minding the stone wall that they kept encountering again and again.
Our wiki page was a result of amalgamation of inputs and ideas of many people. Nishka was the creative head, Marcia and Veenah the head content writers, Akash the critic, Preethi the chief editor and Yaseen and Vishal the computer science and coding masterminds, without whom we could never have bought our page to life.
For any team to smoothly proceed with the project, obtaining funds is a crucial task. Hence the task of fishing funds had fallen upon all of us. But the title of head fund fisher must definitely go to Sheetal Maria Rajan, who apart from managing our Ketto campaign was also responsible for gaining the team a significant percentage of the total funds. Preetha helped Sheetal out in raising funds for the project.
Veenah put her excellent accounting and mathematical skills to use, by volunteering to be the soul in-charge of the team’s accounts and monetary concerns .
The SVCE_CHENNAI team has been a mentor that every first time iGEM team could only dream of. They have guided us, collaborated with us, helped us with trouble shooting and generally have been there for us at our every beck and call. We are basically indebted to them.
Apart from providing us with some useful insights regarding our project whenever we got the chance to interact with them, IIT Madras also were the culture bank, the ones we would approach when we unexpectedly ran out of our culture.
These are researchers from the Shemyakin-Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. They were the first scientists to characterize the latarcin family, and Dr. Vassilevski was one of the first to chemically synthesize the peptides through Fmoc solid-state peptide synthesis. We contacted them via email and they responded to all our queries without hesitation. They were also gracious enough to provide us with access to their papers on latarcin.
A dear friend from our department, Dakshanya helped us out with a lot of creative work for our workshops and Biofair.
Another dear friend and senior from the department, Sakthi helped us with the initial and crucial stages of brainstorming for ideas.
These guys put their photography skills to the best use by agreeing to snap pictures at every event we conducted or were a part of.
