Team:ULaval/Attributions

Team:ULaval - 2019.igem.org


achievements head

Attributions

The management, project design, wet/dry lab, and fund-raising of our team were handled entirely by student members. We did not have any full-time students working on our project at any moment, nor did we received financial compensation.

Coordinating Committee

The Coordinating committee was in charge of making sure the team met all the iGEM deadlines and our own. They facilitated communications between the different committees and arrange team meetings. They also served as a link with both the principal investigators (PIs) and the University. This committee ensured that everything ran smoothly and that the efforts of all team members were synchronized towards our common goals. Nathan, as team leader, worked on the coordination of the team on a broad scale (human resources, contacts, trip to Boston, collaborations, etc.) and the establishment of administrative procedures (calendars, meetings, charter, etc.), was in contact with the iGEM headquarters (form submission, follow-ups, etc.) and was overseeing our progress. He also participated in team recruitment. As committee leaders, Florian, Catherine, François, Elodie/Julien, and Nathan took part in weekly meetings to ensure that we followed our objectives and planned future initiatives.



Science

The Science committee, led by François, was responsible for both the wet lab and dry lab. They consulted the experts of our faculty (Nathan, François, Angel, Pascale and Guillaume). They were in charge of our project design (François, Nathan, Pascale, Carla, Angel, Nastaran and Guillaume).They consulted scientific literature (Guillaume, Nathan, François, Angel, Pascale and Carla), designed the protocols, performed the experiments, built the BioBricks and were involved in a number of collaborations (Pascale, Carla, François, Angel and Nathan). They also created the software to design toehold switches (Angel) and the microfluidic chip and system to be incorporated in our device (François, Nastaran and Ahmed). In addition, they modeled the binding of the trigger to our toehold switch, part of our detection system (Angel).



Scientific Affairs

The Scientific Affairs committee, partially led by Elodie, and then by Julien, was mainly responsible for the human practices as well as the design and production of the Wiki. Elodie and Julien worked on the human practices, whereas Marianne mainly focused on the Wiki construction. They produced most of the texts to be put on the Wiki, summarizing the team’s accomplishments. However, every member of the team participated significantly in the elaboration of content of the wiki. Elodie, Julien and Marianne also consulted experts in different fields to help the team make some decisions as the project progressed. They were also responsible for ensuring that the material produced by the team was well organized and easy to find.



Communications

The Communications committee, led by Florian, was responsible for the social network communications as well as the Public Engagement. Florian, Guillaume and Julien organised and produced the material for the Public Engagement events. They are the link between our team and the public. Florian was also involved in the production of the illustrations needed for the Wiki, collaborations, as well as for the presentation and posters. He also produced any material needed to represent the team such as our T-shirts and banner. Nathan was also the team photographer, was a presenter on multiple talks and actively participated in the presentation creation. Karine drew a plan for all social media and presentations to make our message and aim clear and coherent, and helped maintaining activity on social media pages.Martine was also involved in our public engagement by initiating contacts with TEDxQuebec, Pint of Science and Quebec Science. Catherine will be part of the duo representing our team in the TEDxQuebec event with Nathan.



Finances

The Finances committee was responsible for raising money to make all the purchases related to the laboratory work as well as for all the expenses related to attending the Giant Jamboree. It was led by Catherine. They were responsible for finding sponsors and contacting both local and national companies (Lucas, Martine, Jean-Michel, Catherine and Pascale), as well as managing our finances and produced the appropriate financial reports for non-profit organization (Jean-Michel and Catherine). They launched and managed our GoFundMe page (Catherine). They also organized fund-raising campaigns and events such as candy/chocolate sales and bartending nights. Many of the other members, advisors and PIs also took part in those, including Angel, François, Florian, Marianne, Pascale, Elodie, Helene, Steve, Carla and Guillaume.



Acknowledgements

We would like to thank and acknowledge the professors and professionals that were consulted or who made resources available for us to bring this project to life. A special thank you to the members of the Département de biochimie, de microbiologie et de bio-informatique who believed in us from the very beginning, financially supported us and followed us through this journey.

Special thanks to:

Steve Charette and Hélène Deveau for general support, fundraising help and advice and difficult technique support.

Michel Guertin for general support.

Virginie Pineault for giving us lab support.

Patrick Lagüe for providing us assistance with molecular dynamics simulations and access to the computer servers to perform the simulations.

Gabriel Bégin for helping us mount the webserver to provide our toehold design tool.

Stéphane Larose for giving us access to the computational resources needed to host our webserver.

Caroline Duchaine for commenting and helping us redirect our project based on her aerobiology expertise.

Christian Landry for all experiments were performed in his laboratory.

Matthew Tiranardi (iGEM Concordia) for producing an alternative 3D model for our toehold riboswitch.



igem@bcm.ulaval.ca