Team:Oxford/Attributions

Principal Investigator

Mark
Prof. Mark Howarth
Professor of Protein Nanotechnology - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Mark has been a fantastic PI throughout the duration of the project. He has provided invaluable advice and has pushed us to achieve more than we thought possible.

Mentors

Niels
Niels Wicke
DPhil candidate - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Niels has been part of the project from start to finish. He has helped us with everything from primer design and experimental design to troubleshooting protein expression and plate reader assays.
Rolle
Rolle Rahikainen
Postdoctoral Researcher - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Rolle has been incredibly helpful with troubleshooting our protocols and experimental designs. He was particularly heavily involved in optimising acetone precipitation purifications in preparation for MS. He is also our go-to for ordering new reagents and lab materials.
Nathalie
Nathalie Reichmann
Postdoctoral Research Associate - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Nathalie has been exceptionally dedicated to the problem of Lactobacillus transformation, helping the team through countless protocols until the eventual success. She also helped us with fluorescence microscopy in order to verify expression of our constructs.
Jefferson
Jefferson Smith
DPhil candidate in Synthetic Biology
Jefferson has been on hand at all times both in the lab and during our weekly meetings to offer advice and guidance on experimental design and lab technique.
András
András Sándor
DPhil candidate in Synthetic Biology
Andras was on-hand to answer our immediate lab-related questions.
Alex
Alex Cloake
DPhil candidate in Biological Physics
Alex has been a frequent participant in our weekly meetings and has helped to solve lots of of our day to day lab queries.
Isryad
Irsyad Khairil Anuar
DPhil Candidate - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Isryad has been immensely helpful with our protein purification, particularly when it came to working with Spy&Go.
Ben
Ben Foster
Postdoctoral Researcher - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Ben has been on hand for much of the project to answer our lab-related questions and troubleshoot for us. He has also provided advice on further experimentation in our weekly meetings.
Anthony
Anthony Keeble
Postdoctoral Researcher - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Anthony has been on hand throughout the project to help us order reagents, understand how to use them and develop our experimental designs.
Alex
Alexander Bones
DPhil candidate - Oxford Department of Plant Sciences
Alex provided his expertise particularly on growing lactobacillus in anaerobic conditions and with general lab related queries.
Philipp
Philipp Lorenz
DPhil candidate in Genetics & Bioinformatics
As an iGEM veteran of Oxford’s very first iGEM team he provided us with advice on fulfilling the iGEM criteria, collaborating with other teams and how to present our work.
Arne
Arne Scheu
DPhil Candidate - Oxford Department of Biochemistry
Arne has been involved with the project from the first week when he gave us our first introduction to protein expression and purification and has continued to give advice on that aspect of the lab work. He has also been instrumental in the mass spec analysis of C. difficile supernatant.
Harrison
Harrison Steel
DPhil Candidate - Oxford Department of Engineering
Harrison has been fantastic at giving us feedback and advice on the modelling component of our project.

Individual Attributions


Additional Thanks

  • Gill McLure - Gill has been wonderful throughout the project for her continued support both in terms of organisation and coordination with the Department.
  • Prof. Judy Armitage - Professor Judy Armitage’s lab were extremely kind in sharing their cold room, centrifuges and incubators with us. They also allowed us to make use of their plate reader and gel imaging machine. We are very grateful to them for their patience and collaboration.
  • Prof. Stuart Ferguson - Professor Ferguson very kindly provided us with lab space in the Biochemistry Department, without which the project would not have been possible.
  • Berks & Shammas Lab - We were very lucky to share our lab space with members of the Berks & Shammas lab who helped answer day to day questions about the equipment and resources and were kind enough to share their space with us.
  • Dr. George Wadhams - We discussed our bacterial signalling system with George, which was invaluable as he is an expert in this field.
  • Dr. David Eyre - David is an expert in microbiology and infectious diseases and has worked on C. difficile epidemiology. He very kindly gave up some time to discuss our project with us and you can see how that influenced our design in our Human Practices page.
  • Dr. Søren Thomsen - Soren is CEO and founder of Oxford start-up BioMe, who kindly discussed implementation of our technology with us.
  • Dr. Frances Butcher - Frances is a fully qualified medical doctor and bioethicist with whom we talked through the safety and ethical considerations of our project.
  • Prof. Alison Black - We were incredibly lucky to receive guidance on the creation of our educational leaflets from Alison, who is an expert in information communication.
  • Errin Johnson - Errin is the Electron Microscopy Facility Manager from the Dunn School of Pathology and we are so grateful to her for the beautiful SEM images she took for us.
  • Zack Abbott - Zack very kindly spoke to us despite the large time difference and talked us through his amazing product; the first GM probiotic, and safety considerations we should take account of.
  • Caleb Goodship - Caleb helpfully gave us advice on how to go about creating our wiki and set up for us the initial web page framework.
  • All the amazing CDI patients who gave up their time - Having been through this horrific infection, these previous CDI patients were able to give us a first hand description of the infection, its current treatment and effects. We hope that this will raise awareness of the plight of these patients and drive forward research to help them. It was also a huge personal motivation to our team to try and provide a basis for improvement of their treatment.
  • The lovely over 65s who agreed to talk to us - Over 65s are an oft neglected group in society but they are instrumental to our project as the target patient. We discussed their opinion of genetic engineering, explored their safety concerns and provided them with information about our project and genetic enginering.

    We would also like to thank the following organisations:


    • Corpus Summer School
    • Oxford Museum of Natural History
    • The Oxford Scientist
    • The Oxford Student
    • The Oxford University Biotech Society, particularly Noah Sprent
    • The Quadram Institute
    • The Oxford Centre for Microbiome Studies
    • Phenotype Journal