Team Moscow

Meet our team

We are very excited to introduce our Team Moscow to you!

Julia Kacher

Student leader

Julia is a very responsible person who has brought us together. This year Julia got her BSc in Biology (Bioengineering)

Petr Zaytsev

Student leader

Petr is a talented, bold and enthusiastic Biologist. He worked in Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo and now he is a PhD student at MSU

Max Bokov

SMM, PR

Max has graduated from Biophysics department of MSU. Then he got his MSc in Grenoble University. He is very interested in synthetic biology studies

Iunona Pospelova

Dry lab, SMM

Iunona has just obtained her BSc degree in Biology. She is a very open-minded person and she is interested in Epigenetics and Bionics

Anna Gribkova

Dry Lab, Human Practice

This year Anna has graduated from MSU and obtained her MSc degree in Biology. She is also responsible for the public engagement

Andrey Buynevich

Sponsorship, HumanPractice

Andrey obtained his BSc degree in Biology (Physiology of Higher Nervous Activity) two years ago and right now he is studying Bioeconomics

Irina Talyzina

Wet lab, Human Practice

Irina is a fourth year student at Bioorganical Chemistry department, Faculty of Biology

Alexandra Greshnova

Dry and Wet Lab

Alexandra is a senior student at Bioengineering department of MSU. She always spends a lot of time in the lab and knows everything about it!

Roman Novikov

Dry Lab

Roman is a third year student at Bioengineering department of MSU. Roman is very interested in synthetic biology

Nikita Kosarim

Wet lab

Nikita is a first year MSc student. His fields of interest are molecular biology and genetics

Nikolay Kristovsky

Dry lab and engineering

Nikolay is a fourth year student at Bioengineering department of MSU. He is creating a portable spectrophotometer!

Anna Vakhrusheva

Design and Wet lab

Anna is a very creative and talented PhD student at MSU

Nikolay Chechulin

Manager

Owner of pet-shop "Planet Exotica"

Alexander Kuznetsov

Wet lab

Alex is a first year MSc student. He’s a passionate researcher in virology with a strong experimental focus.

Adil Kabylda

Dry lab

Adil is a graduating student at the Faculty of Chemistry. He is an expert in theoretical chemistry and computer modeling

Renat Vinnikov

Dry lab

Renat is an eleventh-grade student at AESC - Kolmogorov's boarding school. He is interested in bioinformatics and molecular biology

Sergey Dumpis

Wet lab

Sergey is third year student at Department of Biological and Medical Physics of MIPT. He is interested in molecular biology and cancer biology

Pavel Vorobyev

Wet lab

Second year of Master’s degree at MIPT, major at molecular biology. and biophysics. Previously, have earned medical degree at MSMU

Alex Milenkin

Dry lab

Alex is a very enthusiastic biologist from MIPT, he is good at genetic engineering. His Bachelor thesis was connected to CRISPR/Cas system

Meet our supervisors

Alexey Shaytan

Primary Investigator (PI)

PhD in Physics and Mathematics. Leading research scientist at the Bioengineering department, Faculty of Biology, MSU. Head of Integrative Biology Group

Dmitry Karpov

Secondary PI

PhD in Biology. Senior research scientist at Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology (EIMB), Laboratory of Intracellular Proteolysis Regulation

Meet our instructors

Grigory Glukhov

Wet Lab Instructor

PhD in Biology. Junior research scientist at the Bioengineering department, Faculty of Biology

Grigory Armeev

Dry Lab Instructor

PhD in Physics and Mathematics. Senior research scientist at the Bioengineering department, Faculty of Biology

Ekaterina Marilovtseva

Wet Lab Instructor

PhD in Biology. Junior research scientist at the Bioengineering department, Faculty of Biology

Our advisors

Mikhail P. Kirpichnikov

Dean of Faculty of Biology at MSU; Head of Bioengineering Department at Faculty of Biology; Professor; Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Nikolay I. Briko

Head of Epidemiology and Evidence Based Medicine Department, Sechenov Medical University; Professor; Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Chief epidemiologist, Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation

Elena Krasilnikova

Head of the Centre for Studies and analysis of Population, Demography and Healthcare Issues, EAEU Institute

Vasily M. Studitsky

Professor; Head of Laboratory of Transcription and Replication Regulation, Faculty of Biology, MSU

Alexey V. Feofanov

Professor; Head of Laboratory of Optical Microscopy and Spectroscopy of Biomolecules, Faculty of Biology, MSU

Olga S. Sokolova

Professor; Head of Structural Biotechnology Group, Faculty of Biology, MSU

Vera Bashmakova

Head of Biohacking Laboratory at Polytechnical Museum; Chief Editor at Biomolecula.ru

Sergey Shmakov

Research Scientist at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and National Center for Biotechnology Information; expert in the field of CRISPR-Cas systems

Nikolay Lomov

Research Scientist, Department of Molecular Biology, MSU; Jury Member of Russian Competition of Young Biologists

Sponsors

Also we were supported by sponsors on the crowdfunding platform "Boomstarter":

Aleksei Gubarev
Founder of Servers.com, XBT Holding, Haxus Investment Fund

Pavel Yakovlev
Director of Computational Biology Department BIOCAD

Andrei Tsyper
Executive Director of Rambler&Co

Innokentii Mironov
CEO of Bioscience Transfer Institute

Aleksandr Poliakov, Galina Eremina, Iurii Deigin, Ilya Mazo, Mikhail Shkliaev, Aleksandr Popov, Daria Chashkina, Pavel Trukhanov, Ivan Smirnov, Aleksei Koviazin, Oleg Gusev, Ekaterina Pospelova, George Levin, Artyom Sovetnikov, Dmitrii Liubomudrov, Maksim Patrushev, Arthur Zalevsky, Damir Dosymbekov, Karina Klevenkova, Sergei Solovev, Elena Litvinova, Mariia Strelkova, Timofei Grigorev, Viktoriia Korzhova, Aleksei Strygin, Yulya Naraykina, Anton Chugunov, Olga Guskova, Ilya Sukhov, Pavel Papin, Elena Mervine, Ivan Semenov, Evelina Nikelshparg, Dmitrii Magas, Vladimir Egorov, Kirill Yakimenkov, Dmitrii Kozlov, Pavel Mosharev, Diana Mukanova, Mark Fridlyand, Elena Bizina, Lala Akhmedova, Aleksandr Lastochkin, Viktoriia Duben, Anna Talyzina, Andrei Verigin, Aleksei Strygin, Karen Gomktsian, Nadezhda Batina, Olga Gibadullina, Sania Bychkova, Elena Temereva, Olga Mikhailichenko, Petr Kiriushin, Marina Mishchuk, Elizaveta Sigova, Elena Patiukova, Amina Ibragimova, Tatiana Agafonova-Lenskaia, Dmitrii Zinakov, Aleksandra Kolatur, Natalia Zairullina, Vadim Kolontsov, Dmitrii Volkov, Nadezhda Aleksandrova, Lidia Vinnikova, Nina Zakharova, Basketball school "Slamschool", Roman Eremenko, Iana Marchuk, Ilia Biriuk, Tatiana Chasovskaia, Liza Lykhina, Ekaterina Stoliarova, Natalia Nifantova, Olga Polunina, Oleg Tolstikhin, Aleksandr Khokhlov, Elena Iena, Nigina Babachieva.

Attributions

The reason our Team was simply called Moscow mainly based on the fact that this year we gathered people from different establishments: Academic universities, Scientific Institutes and other places. From some point of view, our Team unified these people to achieve a particular goal. And though only several members had an opportunity to participate in the Giant Jamboree, we would like to state the impact of other members in the Team progress.

General support and Administrative issues

In the first place, the main person who inspired us to launch that project was Dr. Alexei Shaytan. By introducing the Course of Synthetic Biology into the curriculum of undergraduate students of our Department, he actually told the core of our Team about iGEM competition and offered to participate in it in 2019. However, though the core of our Team was formed to the end of Spring, none was experienced enough to propose a concrete plan of action. And as it usually happens in Russia, things started to work by the impulse from a strong person – that person was Dr. Elena Krasilnikova. Being the advisor of the previous Russian team in 2017, she showed us the best strategy to start working toward fulfilling iGEM targets.

Through the whole process, from Fed to Oct, Alexei Shaytan together guiding the Team through most of the administrative issues. He took the mission of making appointments with those who could provide us with administrative support, such as our Dean Office at the Moscow State University or specialists from other places. As the result, Alexei managed to provide us with the benchplace to start our wetlab experiments. When other Team members started to take some of these responsibilities on their own, Alexei Shaytan carefully checked their emails and documents in order to achieve the best result possible.

Simultaneously, Petr Zaytsev and Nikolay Chechulin established organization and hierarchy within the Team. In particular, they organized accounts in applications required for work, such as Slack, Google Drive and Trello. Besides that, Petr Zaytsev and Nikolay Chechulin set a schedule for meeting to discuss Team’s administrative and project plans and progress.

Fundraising support and advice

Since our Team had a debut this year, it was not something of well-known, neither in academic nor in business area. Because of this we struggled to find the sponsors at the beginning. The situation was greatly improved when Elena Krasilnikova started to supervise our Team, as she provided us with information to contact many organizations directly.

At the same time, Alexei Shaytan took a chance and got the funding from Admin Office of Faculty of Biology at MSU.

Some of Team members also performed negotiations and prepared the required documents for potential sponsors. While Andrey Buynevich mostly dedicated his efforts towards getting financial aid from pharmaceutical companies, Petr Zaytsev, Anna Gribkova, Nikolay Chechulin and Julia Kacher got the material support from supplier companies.

In addition to that, our Team also took a parallel strategy for getting money from crowdfunding sources. On this field, Andrey Buynevich and Maxim Bokov were responsible for setting up the account on Boomstarter.ru and collected a major sum from the crowdfunding campaign.

Project planning and support

Since the formation of the Team core, members have been brainstorming lots of ideas in order to choose an appropriate topic for iGEM project. Whatever idea we had, first it always passed through the critical review of Alexei Shaytan, who stood as our Primary PI. But in order to supply our ideas with opinion of specialist with great experience in wetlab biology, we welcomed Dr. Dmitriy Karpov and Dr. Grigoriy Gluhovg as Secondary PI and Instructor for our Team, correspondingly. Dmitriy Karpov and Grigoriy Gluhovg not only participated in idea discussion at the beginning of our work, but also supervised all our molecular cloning and protein purification experiments, as well as provided our Team with a bench places and reagents to perform the required experiments. At the middle of our wetlab part, we have invited Dr. Ekaterina Marilovtseva to be another Instructor, as she kindly agreed to assist us in protein binding assay with advice and materials for work.

Since our project also included the engineering part, Dr. Grigoriy Armeev kindly agreed to guide our Team members through this process, as well as generously shared his facilities to perform the construction.

Since our Team choose to work on diagnostics topic at the end, we took several consultations from specialists with medical background. Prof. Nikolay I. Briko made a detailed review of the project, that allowed us to choose the correct direction of our work. Irina Talyzina followed those recommendations to prepare a report that served as an introduction to our topic. Several students from Sechenov University - Sergey Udalov, Maria Kasatkina and Evgeny Spiridonov - greatly assisted us by providing data and figures for that report.

Conducting the experiments

Our Team included several subgroups, each working on experiments in a particular field: bioinformatics, modeling, wetlab and hardware engineering.

It always starts from bioinformatics, where Anna Gribkova and Alexsander Milenkin worked for searching required targets in Borrelia spp. genomes to be detected by our biosensor.

Roman Novikov, Alexandra Greshnova and Iunona Pospelova did a great job in modeling the molecular properties of our biosensor, based on the results of bioinformaticians. At the same time, Renat Vinnikov and Adil Kabylda created a mathematical model, describing the chemistry behind our biosensor.

As the next step, the Team members performed wetlab experiments. First, Nikita Kosarim and Sergei Dumpis took part in designing genetic constructs for our work. Alexandra Greshnova and Julia Kacher obtained fusion constructs of ꞵ-lactamase with dCas9 protein and performed their characterization, while Petr Zaytsev was working on making the expression cassettes for sgRNA for dCas9 binding to the biosensor targets. Also, Pavel Vorobyev developed and checked the pipeline for genomic DNA extraction from gram negative bacteria, which will allow rapid sample preparation for the biosensor.

The major part of our work was about designing and creating a device - photometer and spectrophotometer, that will be able to detect a signal from the biosensor. Nikolay Kristovskiy performed on his own the whole this part: from designing the 3D model of the device - to creating its details and making the software for measuring the light signal.

Public engagement

Introducing our project to the public was one of the most important targets in our list. In order to receive the attention from commercial companies, scientific establishments and social organizations we participated in different kinds of activities: Maxim Bokov, Roman Novikov and Alexsander Milenkin organized accounts on several social networks and successfully introduced our project to the followers. Going further, Maxim Bokov, Anna Gribkova, Julia Kacher, Petr Zaytsev and Roman Novikov gave several pop-science lectures about CRISPR/Cas biology, Lyme disease and biosensors for disease diagnostics - for high-school pupils, university students and non-scientific audience.

With becoming more and more known in Russian scientific and educational community, our team was invented to give interviews for TV channels and private channels, which was accomplished by Maxim Bokov, Anna Gribkova, Julia Kacher, Petr Zaytsev, Roman Novikov, Irina Talyzina and Nikita Kosarim. Our team also presented the biosensor technology at the popular Russian pop-science article competition organised by Biomolecula, with text being written by Nikita Kosarim, Anna Gribkova, Alexandra Greshnova, Julia Kacher, Anna Vakhrusheva and Alexander Kuznetsov and finally reviewed by Vera Bashmakova.

Our Team also took every chance to receive feedback from specialists in different fields of biology, medicine and business. Though all Team members were engaged in such meetings, we would like to notice a major contribution of Anna Gribkova, who was also assisted by Anna Vakhrusheva, Andrey Buynevich, Maxim Bokov and Irina Talyzina.

Scientific networking

Our Team was very excited by opportunities to collaborate and establish good working relationships with other iGEM teams. We are proud to state that every student member of our Team was involved in communication with a particular team, with the whole process being supervised by Maxim Bokov. Especially we would like to notice the contribution of Petr Zaytsev, Alexander Kuznetsov, Anna Gribkova, Roman Novikov, Maxim Bokov and Iunona Pospelova, who conducted experiments and produced valuable results side-by-side with other teams. Our Team also participated in several entertaining collaborations, aimed to bring iGEMers from different parts of the world together - mainly ran by Maxim Bokov, Sergei Dumpis, Julia Kacher and Iunona Pospelova.

Presenting results

Though every member of our team produced a piece of valuable result for presenting to the iGEM Judges, some of the Team members did the exceptional contribution for that.

We greatly appreciate the efforts of Anna Vakhrusheva, Julia Kacher and Anna Gribkova in creating the design of our presentation, Wiki page and Team logo. Our special regards goes for Nikolay Chechulin, Pavel Slavin and Mark Pankin for recording and making gorgeous videos about our Team and the project.

Our Team members are grateful to Tatiana Gavrilova and Anastasia Sharapkova (Rosetta Stone MSU) for translating and language correction in particular paragraphs of our Wiki texts.

And last (but not least!) gratitudes are for our Team’s programmer - Alex Silvanovich, who dedicated lots of time for uploading our text, data and figures in Registry of Standard Biological Parts and our Team Wiki.

Team:Moscow/Attributions

Team Moscow