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Attributions

iGEM is truly a team competition which extends past the students working tirelessly over test tubes, equations, and networking emails, but to the greater community of researchers, educators, peers, and neighbors. The W&M iGEM team is immensely grateful for the support and advice given to us during our 2019 season and would like to recognize those in and out of the lab who helped bring SmartFilms to the Boston Jamboree.

Advisors

No words can describe the aid provided to the W&M iGEM team by Dr. Margaret Saha. As our PI and team advisor, she has gone above and beyond what her role calls for. For the continual advice, undying interest, and enormous passion for our team and synthetic biology, we thank you Dr. Saha.

We would like to thank Dr. Mainak Patel for his advice and guidance on mathematical modelling and computer simulation. We also really appreciate his detailed feedback on our modeling report.

Financial Support

We would like to thank Vice Provost Dennis Manos for his enduring support of iGEM and synthetic biology at William and Mary.

We would like to thank Dean Kate Conley and the Charles Center at William and Mary for championing our team and providing necessary financial support.

We would like to thank New England Biolabs, Epoch Life Sciences Inc, IDT, Twist BioScience, and BioBasic for the generous financial support and resources that allow us to pursue the research we love.

Faculty Support

We would like to thank Dr. Eric Bradley for his kindness helping us find equipment and lab space.

Dr. Mark Forsyth was essential to the development of our adhesin library and overall advice on microbiology.

We are so grateful to the biology office at William & Mary for their ongoing support. Thank you to Jessica Shelton, Charnel Thornton, and Renee Peace for making our research possible.

Consults

Dr. Neel Joshi was extremely generous with his time and resources. We are very grateful for his advice and the curli fibers he was able to send to us. He truly represents the iGEM spirit of learning and collaboration.

Dr. Ramon Esteban was able to give us insight into the role biofilms play in orthopedics, specifically prosthetic joint infections. Thank you.

Dr. Helen Murphy gave very helpful advice on how to improve the accuracy of our diffusion model in the lab with low agarose plates.

Dr. Leah Shaw and Dr. Gregory Smith gave extremely detailed feedback on our math models. Thank you so much for your time and interest.

Dr. Robert Michael Lewis provided very useful suggestions that helped us build the machine learning models. Thank you so much for your time and patience.

We are so grateful to Jason Lin for lending his expertise on web scraping and data collection. We wouldn't be able to achieve full automation on updating our outreach database without his dedication. We also thank him for helping us create our wiki platform. It is due to his skill that you can read everything up here.

We would like to thank Marissa Chai Hibbert for her help with outreach over the summer.

Team Attributions

Julia Urban served as one of three co-captains for the 2019 William and Mary iGEM team. She participated in recruitment of the 2019 team and oversaw training of new wetlab members. She was involved in all aspects of wetlab, including circuit design, cloning and DNA assembly, and part characterization. Though she and the other co-captains managed the general trajectory of the project, she focused especially on the construction and characterization of synthetic curli operons. Outside of wetlab, she designed the 2019 team logo and banner, and represented the team at William and Mary’s homecoming academic showcase. Like all William and Mary iGEM team members, she participated in community outreach and human practice efforts, including the Qubes data science conference.

Xiangyi Fang is responsible for maintaining supplies for lab solutions, chemicals, as well as creating protocols for new solutions. She also works with Mycobacterium smegmatis, designing 3G compatible Mycobacterium parts and adapting protocols for Mycobacterium electro-transformation.

Adam Oliver is responsible for making sure that the lab remains in working order. This includes ordering reagents, designing parts, creating daily task lists, and tracking lab progress. He was responsible for finding, designing, and testing the quorum sensing and SaSuhB circuits. Furthermore, he was responsible for microscopy. Along with other lab members, he was responsible for daily cloning of parts, background research, preparation of presentations, and wiki work.

Elias Nafziger isolated all BSL-2 parts, as well as designed and characterized the parts and circuits related to the fap operon. He also designed the concept circuit to investigate harnessing pDAWN-cI to co-express adhesins. Aside from these mini-projects, he was involved in all general wetlab work. Outside of wetlab, he created the promoter design activity for QUBES and was one of the team members to present at the Mid-Atlantic Meet-Up and the BioMath Meeting at the College of William and Mary.

Sanjana Challa was involved in all general wetlab work throughout the summer and the fall. She helped with the various side projects that were lead by other team members. Outside of wetlab, she was the coordinator for all the collaborations and designed the t-shirts. She also helped write the molecular genetics QUBES activity and presented at the Qubes data science conference. In addition, she was the main writer for the entire synthetic biology supplement for the Openstax Deliverable.

Beteel Abu-Ageel worked on developing a system to allow for the formation of stochastic Turing patterns in E. coli based on the design by researchers Karig et al, detailed in their paper "Stochastic Turing Patterns in a Synthetic Bacterial Population." She was also helping with general wetlab tasks and presented at the Mid-Atlantic iGEM Meet-Up and the W&M BioMath Conference.

Hanqiu Peng implemented machine learning algorithms for text classification, helped develop models and simulations for wet lab experiments, and established the outreach database with Jason Lin. He was also involved in creating Wiki pages and editing chapters on OpenStax Biology 2e. Besides, he designed the “DNA Digital Data Storage” activity for QUBES and was one of the presenters at the Biomath meeting at the College of William and Mary.

Vivian Zhu is responsible for understanding, implementing, and running the math models in Matlab. She was responsible for understanding the biological process that is going on behind the model to explain where the variables are coming from. She was also responsible for tuning and testing for the best parameters for those math models.