Team:Dalhousie/Attributions

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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 meetings 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 production of 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 synthetic 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 interviews 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 Wildlife 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, and cosmid pJC8.
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
Members of the team that worked on this were Mackenzie Thornbury with the help of Bess Pearson, Matt Curry, and Nicholas Boudreau.

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
Hallam Lab (UBC) for providing substrates and guidance for the enzymatic fluorophore assay.
Members of the team that worked on this were Jacob Sicheri, Mariam El-Aghil, Caroline Guinard, David Mahoney, Matt Curry, Nicholas Boudreau, and Mackenzie Thornbury.

Dry Lab Support

Dr. Morgan Langille and Dr. Andre Comeau of the Integrated Microbiome Resource at Dalhousie University for the free metagenomic sequencing of the porcupine. Drs. Langille and Comeau were on- hand whenever 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
Nicholas Boudreau, Jacob Sicheri, and Matt Curry worked on carrying out the pipeline.

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.
Team members that worked on Human Practices were Angela Tsai, Nicholas Boudreau, Francis Routeledge, and Mackenzie Thornbury
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 Steve Thurbide from the Discovery Centre for giving us the opportunity to provide outreach in their Innovation Lab.
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.
Dr. Steven Snobelen for agreeing to an interview, and giving us advice on how to properly set up our science communication survey.

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.
Serena Drouillard for her tireless efforts on making and coding the website. Matt Curry, Jacob Sicheri, Mackenzie Thornbury, and Emma Finlayson-Trick for peripheral help on uploading content to the wiki.

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 Springboard 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!
Hirtle Promotions for making our amazing t-shirts!
Dr. Richard Singer for providing us with mentorship n how to write good lay summaries.