We wholeheartedly thank all of the following individuals and institutions for their interest and contributions to the development of this project. Their support is commendable and we thank them for expanding our synthetic biology toolbox.
We would like to thank our mentor Dr. Josh Leonard for advising us throughout this process, attending our weekly meetings and making himself available to answer any questions we had. We would also like to thank Dr. John Mordacq, Biological Sciences Professor at Northwestern, for letting us utilize his lab space for the duration of the summer and providing us with any necessary equipment and materials.
We would also like to thank our graduate student mentor, Kirsten Jung, for always being there to answer our questions, giving us guidance on assays and cloning, meeting with us almost every day to talk to us about our project progress, and coming to our meetings with wisdom and encouragement.
Special thanks to the Northwestern 2018 team, Umut Akova, Liza Fitzgerald, Michael Johnson, Jacob Kurian, and Christian Thorsberg, for guiding us through our iGEM journey. Another special thanks to Jack Arnold, from the Northwestern 2017 team, for giving us advice on funding and for always answering questions about lab equipment.
Thank you all for providing the springboard for us to make more headway and coming to the rescue whenever we had yet another question.
GRADUATE STUDENT AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT
Thanks to our phenomenal graduate students for taking time off their busy schedule to help us troubleshoot cloning problems, brainstorm new experiments and teach us lab safety:
Bon Ikwuagwu, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Tullman-Ercek Lab: for making yourself available throughout the summer to talk through aspects of our project and helping us troubleshoot our problems during weekly meetings.
Patrick Donahue, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Leonard Lab: for helping us characterize a part, giving us advice on how to run a cellular plate reader assay, and helping us set up the plate reader in the Leonard lab.
Bradley Biggs, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Tyo Lab: for giving us advice on how to calibrate the plate reader.
Alex Prybutok, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Leonard Lab: for giving us advice to help best model our project and meeting with us periodically throughout the summer.
Adam Silverman, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Jewett Lab: for meeting with us to explore the idea of a cell-free system, coming to our brainstorming meetings in the spring, and answering our questions.
Hana Kubo, Driskill Graduate Program in Life Sciences: for reaching out to us and providing clarification about the human practices and modeling medal requirements.
Ashty Karim PhD, Research Fellow and Assistant Scientific Director of Jewett Lab: for meeting with us to go over how cell-free systems work, how a cell-free biosensor would be used by a consumer, and how our specific system could be incorporated into a cell-free system.
MATERIALS
Special thank you to Dr. John Mordacq, Lucks Lab, Leonard Lab, and the Tullman-Ercek Lab for providing reagents, supplies, and other materials for PCRs, gels, transformations, and experiments.
HUMAN PRACTICES SUPPORT
Special thank you to the Mentorship Opportunities for Research Experience (MORE) Program and Niles West High School for working with us and allowing us to host a workshop about synthetic biology and our iGEM project to local STEM-focused high school students.
