Team:Sydney Australia/Attributions

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Acknowledgements & Contributions

Acknowledgements

We have accomplished many things in the short time that we have been working on this project. We are proud to say that we have successfully synthesised psychedelics in E. coli ! None of our achievements would have been possible without the many people who have helped us on this journey. As a team, we have been incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by a group of supportive and incredibly helpful people in our lab and in our personal lives. We have also felt extremely touched by the help we have received from the broader scientific community in numerous disciplines.



Our supervisor

Thanks first and foremost to our supervisor, Nick Coleman.

Your dedication, generosity, enthusiasm, humour and kindness have made this an unbeatable experience. We can’t possibly list every way that you’ve helped us, but just know that we appreciate it all. Thank you for everything. We hope that we have made you proud.


Wet lab acknowledgements

We would love to extend a huge thanks to the entire group in the Coleman lab.

Thank you to Scott Mitchel, Nick Yang, Helen Douglas, Debora Rich, and Brodie Gillieatt. They have put up with us finding our feet in their precious lab space, accidentally stealing their enzymes, using more LB than we could make in the early days… but somehow we think we managed to find our way into their hearts over the course of this project. We could not have made it as far as we have without their impromptu advice, lab meeting input and fantastic senses of humour.

A massive thanks to Mark Somerville, iGEM alumni and Coleman lab research assistant for being our in-lab Google, whose morose sense of humour and acerbic wit carried us through many a dark period in the lab!

An especially huge thanks goes out to Claudia Moratti, iGEM alumni and PhD student at Coleman lab, for being like a secondary supervisor to us. Thank you for your endless advice, for easing our concerns, and for making us feel like we were on the right track.

Thank you Dr Elizabeth Gillam for your p450 indole assay protocol. It really helped us troubleshoot and stop banging our heads against the proverbial wall with that assay! What a lifesaver!

We are very grateful to Nicholas Proschogo and his team in the chemistry department at USYD for their speedy work with our enzyme assay LCMS samples. They were incredibly helpful, ran the samples by hand because their machine was playing up, and even gave us interpretation tips for the data!

Thank you to Jens Altvater and Ben Crossett at the Charles Perkins Centre, USYD, for processing our protein LCMS for us so we could confirm the identity of our proteins.


Dry Lab Acknowledgements

The most huge thank you goes out to Tristan Ofner who helped us drastically with our modelling and software. He is the designer of The Codonator. Endlessly patient with all our requirements and requests, and so much more fascinated by the mathematics behind the codon harmonisation than we could ever be. There aren’t enough chocolates in the world to express our thanks for all the work you have put in. You are an honourary iGEM team member in our eyes.

Thank you to Jack Cooper who helped us perform statistical analysis on our Vivid codon harmonisation experiment results, we really appreciate your time and hard work.


The University of Sydney

Thank you to the University of Sydney for allowing iGEM to be run as a unit - it has helped us in many ways, and allowed us to devote more time to our project.



Human Practices Acknowledgements


A big thank you to all of the academics and experts who gave up their time to talk to us for our Psilocybin talks!


  • Dr Margaret Ross, St Vincents
    • An extra thanks to Margaret Ross for her support throughout our project since we met her at the APS event at the University of Sydney.
  • Dr Alan Davis, John Hopkins
  • Dr Francis Moreno, University of Arizona
  • Dr Prashanth Puspanathan, the Alfred Hospital
  • Dr Sam Banister, Lambert Initiative
    • Additional thanks for helping our supervisor, Nick Coleman, navigate the licensing laws that were crucial for getting our project off the ground. We are very grateful for your help.
  • Dr Dale McClure
    • An extra thanks to Dale McClure for allowing us to use his lab to run a scale up experiment for an entire day, and for always being available for follow up questions.
  • Adam Bandt MP, Federal Member for Melbourne

Outreach and Engagement

Thank you to Caitlin Fisher, who organises many outreach programs at the University and helped us with our WMBB workshop.

Thank you to Margaret Espejel, a lab manager at the University of Sydney, for her fantastic help with setting up for the WMBB outreach event we participated in.

Thank you Hannah Sassi for helping us get involved with the Science Week booth at the Australian Museum, we had a fantastic time!

Thank you to the amazing Holly Kershaw, the organiser of Innovation Games. Thanks for putting up with our frantic last minute texts and questions!

Thanks to Chau Le and Eugenia O’Brien for their impeccable organisation of USYD Open day - we had such a great time.

Thank you to Yolanda Plowman from JAMS Sydney for inviting us to speak at their September talks, it was an invaluable opportunity.

Thank you, UNSW iGEM team, for bringing us into your symposium as a speaker and guest. We learnt so much and we’re glad we could help each other with our outreach and presentations.

Thank you to Synthetic Biology Australasia, in particular Claudia Vickers, for inviting us to the Synthetic Biology Australasia conference in Brisbane and helping us to get there. Hearing the speakers was inspiring and getting to practice our presentation in front of a large audience and educate more people about our project was a fantastic opportunity.


Creative Works

A massive thank you to Madison Pollard for her amazing work designing our logo. Having six incredibly opinionated clients for the one project can’t have been easy and we have been so incredibly impressed with the quality of our logo. We cannot thank you enough.

Thank you so much Gabriel Gasparinatos of Entropico for your absolutely stellar work on our video. It looks so sleek and professional, but with just a hint of fun - exactly as we wanted it! Thank you for listening to our wishes, and for obeying our PPE ‘floor and counters and doors are lava’ rules when filming in the lab!


Family, Friends, and Loved Ones.

Last but absolutely not least - we want to extend the most heartfelt thanks to our friends, partners and family. Thank you for listening to us talk about iGEM non-stop, putting up with us being in the lab all hours of the day and night, supporting us through times of stress, and sharing our joy in this incredible experience.


Thank you to our sponsors!


Contributions

Roles of the team members

Fahad Ali was the team leader. He worked in the wet lab, pitching in on numerous experiments but focusing largely on the Psi Experiments. He also organised and wrote all the parts pages, and took on the modelling work despite his existential fear of mathematics.

Merrie Caruana was the wet lab leader. She helped keep the team on track and was involved in every experiment. She also ended up doing lots and lots of fluorescence assays, and is now an expert in that area.

Nathan Hawkins was our protein maestro - a role that he somewhat unwillingly adopted halfway through the project. He did most of the protein expression and characterisation work for PsiD, K and M enzymes. He was also involved in the scale up and industrialisation experiments and interviews.

Emma Todd was head of human practices and integrated human practices. She contacted and interviewed numerous experts. If you have any questions about psychedelics, Emma can answer them. She also did some wet lab work, and dabbled in coding some portions of the website.

Benj Gonzaga did extensive lab work in the first half of the project, and did most of the VVD expression work. He also taught himself to code from scratch and coded the whole website.

Isobel Magrath was in charge of human outreach and engagement. She organised all of the outreach events. She also did a lot of wet lab work, with a focus on PsiH experiments.



Timeline of our Project

The University of Sydney counts iGEM as a subject - the criteria for which is freely available. The first assessment for this subject was a persuasive essay, which also formed part of our application to join the team. We were accepted to the team in May, and met for the first time on the 23rd of the month. We began planning the project, and started lab work as soon as we had finished our Semester 1 exams in June. We did our lab work over our 6 week winter break, and through the first 10 weeks of our second semester. Our iGEM deliverables - poster, wiki, presentation - counted as assessments for the University iGEM course. We also had to complete a reflective journal during the project.