Difference between revisions of "Team:Dalhousie/Attributions"

We had an incredibly successful year which wouldn’t have been possible without the support of so many dedicated people. We would like to take the chance to thank these people here for all of their help. It really means a lot to us.

2017 Team and Project

Team recruitment was started in the Month of February and bi-weekly meeting were held in March to flesh out the 2017 project idea. By the end of March, we had decided to continue working on the project from the previous year: Cloning the cellulose degradation pathway into E. coli for efficient conversion of wood waste to glucose, then ethanol by yeast.
iGEM elections for team leads were held in April. We elected the president and 5 team leads: Wet Lab, Dry Lab, Web Design, Fundraising and Human Practices. Our team was 24 undergraduate students at the beginning of April. Over the course of April and May we developed our project, and the goals we wanted to complete before the Jamboree.
Starting in June we began mining through the metagenomic library for enzymes to synthesize and sent in our first synthesis order. In June we also started building the metagenomic cosmid library which continued with much troubleshooting until the end of October. Cloning began immediately after our first IDT shipment arrived and assay development started early September. This continued into late October.
In June we also started contacting people for our science communication project, we wanted to ensure that our science project would be understood by the most people possible, especially in the era of fake news. Human practices finished all interview by early October. Our project was developed by undergraduate students at Dalhousie University with the help of the following people.

Faculty Support of the Project

Dr. Craig McCormick, Dr. John Rohde, and Dr. Lois Murray who helped form the project from the beginning and helped shape the direction of the project. Drs. McCormick and Rohde provided their lab and many reagents to get us started. Dr. Rohde for presentation coaching and creating interest in the journal club Dr. Murray arranged the use of the Microbiology and Anatomy teaching lab for use during the summer.

Wet Lab Support

Metagenomic Library
Shubenacadie Wild Life Park for providing the porcupine fecal samples
Dr. Trevor Charles, Dr. Juigun Cheng, and Dr. John Hiel from University of Waterloo who welcomed us into their lab and taught us how to create a cosmid library for functional metagenomics. Dr. Charles also provided us with E.coli strain HB101.
Dr. Melanie Dobson for her mentorship and support for trouble-shooting metegnomic library assembly and working with large DNA.
Dr. Jason Leblanc for giving us access to his PFGE rig and offering instruction and supervision during our first attempt

Cloning and Assay Development
Patrick Slaine for his mentorship on primer design, general cloning and assay development
Jamie Cook for his mentorship in assay development
Emma Finlayson-Trick for general cloning tips and laboratory supervision
Landon Getz for general cloning tips and laboratory super vision

Dry Lab Support
Dr. Morgan Langille and Dr. Andre Comeau of the Integrated Microbiome Resource at Dalhousie Unievrsity for the free metagenomic sequencing of the porcupine. Drs. Langille and Comeau were on- hand when ever we needed analysis support or help.
Landon Getz for writing the pipeline we used to pull out novel cellulose-degrading enzymes from the metagenomic sequencing

Human Practices and Outreach Support

General:
Emma Finlayson-Trick for her dedicated mentorship to the human practices team. Emma helped steer our ideas and kept us in-check for deadlines, as well as provided creative solutions to the ideas we wanted to investigate. Emma also facilitated the creation of our blog: “Think of the PLOSibilities” in collaboration with PLoS journals to provide lay summaries to increase scientific literacy.

Outreach:
Jennifer Baechler from Shad Valley for allowing us to teach a DNA extraction workshop
Abbey Martin from Dalhousie SuperNova Camps for including us in their programming
Paul Briggs and Heidi MacKinnon for giving us access to the Biochemistry teaching labs for Shad Valley and SuperNova workshops
Ryan Jameson and Ryan Thurbide from the Discovery Centre for giving us the opportunity to provide outreach in their Innovation lab, as well as presenting our project to STEM-interested high school students from the area
The Dalhousie Microbiology and Immunology Department for letting us use their space at Dalhousie Open House to spread the word of iGEM to prospective Dalhousie Students

Integrated:
David Lloyd of FREDsense for agreeing to an interview and giving us priceless advice for improving our iGEM team
Dr. Eddy Rubin for agreeing to interview and giving us insight to the future metagenomics and DNA sequencing technology
Port Hawkesbury Paper for agreeing to interview and giving us insight to the pulp and paper industry Scott Doncaster and Grant MacKenzie of BioVectra for inviting us to the factory and showing us around.

Science Communication:
Bob MacDonald of Quirks and Quarks for agreeing to an interview on Science Communication
Science Sam (Samantha Yammine) of University of Toronto for agreeing to interview and giving her opinions on how science communication can become better in this age of fake news.
Dan Faulk for agreeing to an interview and giving us insight on his take on science communication
Dr. Catherine Reeves for agreeing to interview and giving her professional opinion on science communication

Fundraising Support
Dalhousie University Office of Advancement for helping us create a successful crowdfunding campaign
Molly Marcott for being the fundraising lead and using her experience in management to bring fundraising to new heights.
Dr. Craig McCormick for using his many connections and knowledge of fundraising to mentor us

Web Design Support
Landon Getz for hosting workshops on web design and providing help whenever we got stuck
Jacob Nearing for his mentorship on web design

Business Support
Dr. Craig McCormick for keeping tracks of books
Drs. Craig McCormick, David Anderson and Andrew Makrigiannis for signing off on a special purposes account for Dalhousie iGEM
The Industry Liaison and Innovation office at Dalhousie University for providing us with industry contacts, helping us apply to the Spring Board Grant and providing advice on intellectual property Charmine Gaudet and Kristin Tweel of Genome Atlantic for putting us in connection with local biotech companies and writing a blog about our team to get our name out there!

General Acknowledgments
Logo Designs by Abdullah Al-Khaledi
Wiki: Main facilitator is Serena Drouillard who put in a heroic amount of work to make our Wiki aesthetically pleasing and functional
Recruitment: Dr. McCormick, Dr. Zhenyu Cheng, Patrick Slaine, Landon Getz and Emma Finlayson-Trick for reading over applications and choosing a strong team.
The Department of Microbiology and Immunology for being so supportive of this initiative and giving us space and advice!