We extend our thanks to those who have helped and assisted us with our project throughout the year. All of the work we have conducted would not have been possible without the support we received from them. Specific references to the work done by those named below can also be found on the relevant pages with whose content they assisted with.

Associate Professor Christopher Marquis

PI

Chris has supported, mentored and encouraged our team throughout the past year. Among other things, we are especially grateful for his help in adapting methodologies to suit our needs, the troubleshooting help he has provided and his experienced guidance for both the wet lab and dry lab components. We would also like to thank him for the work he has done over the past year in securing resources and space for us to use, and for kindly allowing us to use his equipment. He has provided ongoing support with particular examples of his contribution to our project include Chris finding several speakers for our symposium and helping us use corrosive reagents for the Salkowski assay.

Dr Dominic Glover

Secondary PI

Dominic has also supported, mentored and encouraged our team over the year. We are particularly grateful for his help in suggesting and expressing prefoldin and letting us borrow Daniel, his lab equipment and reagents such as pET-19b. We also appreciate him sharing his area of research (prefoldin) with our team, and the many hours he spent with our team to troubleshoot our experiments. He has provided ongoing support with particular examples of his contribution to our project include helping us to express our prefoldins and helped us with the design of our Gibson overhands.

Dr Daniel Winter

Lab Mentor

Daniel has also supported, mentored and encouraged our team throughout the year. We are thankful for him teaching us new molecular biological techniques, and helping us master ones we had previously used. He also helped troubleshoot our experiments, gave us general support, and ran transmission electron microscopy for us, allowing us to visualise how our structure assembles. Daniel also connected us with many of the other collaborators listed below, including Dr Donald Thomas.

Jessica Mazalo

Mentor

Jess has also supported, mentored and encouraged our team over the year. She attended weekly project meetings throughout the year, and provided general feedback and advice on our project's direction, as well as suggestions for troubleshooting. She assisted the team with lab experiments, particularly DNA cloning, testing protein expression, and the plant growth assays. Jess also played a role in developing the project design elements and gave feedback on our presentation style.

Maddie Wainright

Mentor

Maddie has also supported, mentored and encouraged our team over the year. She attended weekly project meetings and provided general feedback and advice on our project's direction. She was the primary mentor and support for the human practices team, playing an integral role in suggesting speakers for events. Maddie also mentored and advised the team regarding the use of graphic design in our project, which included her producing one of the GIFs on the wiki, and commenting on the communication style of our presentation.

Shivani Shah

Mentor

Shivani attended project meetings and provided general advice on our project's direction and the flow of lab work. She was helpful in the design of our cloning experiments and assisted with interpretation of results. Shivani also gave us advice and feedback on our presentation style.

Lab Work

Dr Abbas Farahani

We would like to thank Abbas for helping us run the HPLC machine on our samples

Dr Django Nathan

We would like to thank Django for his assistance with cloning.

Hélène Lebhar

We would like to thank Hélène for assistance with protein expression and performing Size Exclusion Chromatography for us.

Dr Julie Dechorgnat

We would like to thank Julie for sending us Arabidopsis thaliana seeds and answering our questions on the best practices of growing plants in the lab.

Lotte von Richter

We would like to thank Lotte for giving us a tour of PlantBank in the Australian National Botanic Gardens to show us their tissue culturing methods.

Professor Palli Thordarson

We would like to thank Palli for explaining and running the HPLC machine on our standards for us, and allowing us to use his equipment.

Modelling

Dr Donald Thomas

We would like to thank Donald for running the Molecular Dynamics model on our scaffold for our team.

Dr Lawrence Lee

For his support and suggestions on how to approach creating a model representative of a biological system, and allowing the presentation of ideas to his lab group for feedback.

Dr Quoc Thong Le Gia

We would like to thank Quoc for his assistance in transferring the theoretical model to computational software.

Dr Warren King

We would like to thank Warren for his advice on considerations to be had creating models, offering solutions to anticipated problems.

Associate Professor William Mclean

We would like to thank William for his advice on the generation of molecular meshes, and the finite element method as a process to compute the problem numerically.

Human Practices

Dr Alexandra George

We would like to thank Alexandra for her help deciphering the underpinnings of Australian intellectual property law.

Dr Brad Walsh

We would like to thank Brad for his guidance on commercialising our scaffold in the Australian market, and his explanations about the multi-factorial nature of this process.

Carl Stubbings

We would like to thank Carl for sitting on a panel at our symposium, to which he brought insightful ideas about business considerations in synthetic biology ethics.

Dr Hugh Goold

We would like to thank Hugh for sitting on a panel at our symposium, and discussing the scientific relevance of ethical considerations in synthetic biology.

Dr Kostantinos Vavitsas

We would like to thank Kostantinos for assisting the team in publishing our article on the Synthetic Biology Australia (SBA) website.

Lan Le

We would like to thank Lan for helping us discover all the regulations to which research at the University of New South Wales is subject, and the safeguards put in place.

Associate Professor Matthew Kearnes

We would like to thank Matthew for sitting on a panel at our symposium, and discussing the important social considerations inherent within the ethics of synthetic biology.

Dr Nicolas Rasmussen

We would like to thank Nicolas for inviting us to present to his Environmental Humanities students, to spread the word about synthetic biology and practice our presentation skills.

Professor Paul Groundwater

We would like to thank Paul for his suggestions for possible applications of our scaffold in drug synthesis.

Roseville College

We would like to thank Roseville College for visiting our university and allowing us to test our educational package on their year 11 biology students.

Dr Wallace Bridge

We would like to thank Wallace for his help in preparing our presentation for the Jamboree.

Sponsors

We'd also like to thank all of our sponsors for their generous donations. Without all of the funding we have received, our project would not have been able to get to the stage it is at now.