Our enormous gratitude to our mentors for advising us throughout our iGEM experience, attending our weekly meetings, providing continuous guidance and making themselves available to answer any questions we had throughout our iGEM experience.
Alex Deiters
Provided knowledgeable insights and tips on our project design and research. Got us connected with his graduate student Wenyuan Nathan Zhou.
Jason Lohmueller
Instituted iGEM at University of Pittsburgh and has continued to provide valuable assistance in terms of providing reagents and protocols, troubleshooting issues, interpreting lab results and coming up with useful approaches.
Sanjeev Shroff
Worked out logistics for iGEM at Pitt in respect to funding and university policy. Provided valuable consultation on modeling, data analysis and results.
Cheryl Telmer
Organized our collaborations with Pittsburgh CSL team along with providing a lot of valuable tips about cloning.
Nastasa Miskov-Zivanov
Graciously provided us with lab space, guided us in development of our modeling, and made sure we were meeting deadlines.
Dan Gongaware and Tara Skeel
Managed the budget and financing for the iGEM team, including placing orders for all supplies and reagents
Adam Butchy
Provided valuable suggestions on modeling and data analysis.
Laboratory
We want to especially thank Natasa Miskov-Zivanov for graciously providing her laboratory space in the Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering building at the University of Pittsburgh for the iGEM team to conduct our research.
Interviews
We want to especially thank all experts who invested time in discussing synthetic biology and our project with us. They not only provided guidance on directions to take with our research, but they also left a lasting impact on the way we perceive the field. Please see our Integrated Human Practices page to read about how they influenced our iGEM experience and project design.
Santiago Molina
Ph.D Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley
Dr. Weixin Tang
Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University
Dr. W. Seth Childers
Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Warren Ruder
Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Researcher in the McGowan Institute, University of Pittsburgh.
Dr. Ahmed Dallal
Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Pittbsurgh
Kunal Aggarwal, Ali Sinan Saglam
Postdoc and graduate student respectively; University of Pittsburgh Faeder Lab (Computational Biology, Bionetgen)
Additional Assistance
We also want to thank many other people in helping and supporting us with our research.
Dave Gau
Provided crucial resources throughout our research for example access to laboratory equipment, like gel imager, and reagents.
Stephen Smith
Helped us get access to gel imager, provided us with chemical reagents and pH meter for different buffers.
Wenyuan Nathan Zhou
Provided crucial protocol of nCas9 mutagenesis for our improve part. Provided reagents such as Proteinase K. Helped with procedures such as sonication, buffer exchange and SDS-PAGE.
Project Development
Our team was selected in March from which we began brainstorming on March 26th and continued developing our ideas until the second week of May. From there, we transitioned into ordering necessary laboratory materials and synthesized DNA to begin wet lab work and have worked continuously up to the Giant Jamboree.
Two of our 2018 iGEM team members, Matt and Tucker, took a synthetic biology class offered by the Univerity in Spring of 2018. This class inspired them to explore the field of synthetic biology and join the Pitt iGEM team.
Project Inspiration
We want to acknowledge two research papers that inspired CUTSCENE.
We acknowledge financial support and sponsorship from the University of Pittsburgh (Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research, Honors College, Department of Biological Sciences, Department of Chemistry, Swanson School of Engineering, Department of Bioengineering, and Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering), New England Biolabs (NEB), and Integrated DNA Technologies (IDT).
