The 2018 iGEM Evry Paris-Saclay team was composed by master and bachelor students, but the project would not have been possible without the help of many people whom we wanted to thank.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

HOST INSTITUTIONS

• The institute of Systems and Synthetic Biology (iSSB), part of UMR8030 Genomics Metabolics managed by Marcel Salanoubat hosted us and allowed us access to the abSYNTH plateform of Genopole managed by Joan Herrisson. We want to thank researchers and PhD student for their kindness and accessibility, and also for their help when we needed it and especially to Sylvie Bobelet who support us since the beginning of the competition.


• Pr Jean-loup Faulon gently allowed us to perform most of our experiments in his lab and helped us with the funding.

FUNDING

• Genopole, with the help of Emmanuel Desquier, and the University of Paris-Saclay provided for the main financial support.


• The University of Evry-val-d'Essonne and the France Embassy in the United States provided a valuable financial support.

MATERIAL SUPPORT

• Smart Bioscience supplied samples of pure synthetic peptides for our caracterisation experiments.


• SnapGene supplied ten free licences of its software for molecular biology which was essential to design our project.

EXTERNAL ADVICES

• Cyrille Pauthenier, from the Abolis company, supported us, calibrated the HPLC and explained the whole process to the members. He kindly verified our mass spectrometry analyses.
• Guillaume Hutzler gave us precious advices on how he used to popularise informatic circuits to the general public. We used these advices to explain the working of a biological logic gate.
• Jérôme Bonnet, Gregory Tufo and Volker Döring expressed their views on our project and gave us nice advices on which applications would be performed thanks to our project.
• We received instructions for lab safety and security from Dominique Zeliszewski (iSSB).
• Rose Berthomé, Jérémy Armetta and Yanis Khenniche, who were in the team last year, provided critical advices on creating and managing an iGEM team and continuously supported our team.

SPECIAL THANKS

• A special thank to Ioana Popescu, who has encouraged the creation of our team and who has been there at every steps of the project. More than a supervisor she provided help and emotional support to us. The success of this project is largely due to her.
• We also want to thank our supervisor, Manish Kushwaha, and our advisors, Nazim Sarica and Steff Horemans, who were there from the first brainstorming to the birth of the project and its realisation, who followed us through this adventure, advised and helped us to build the project and the experiments.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE TASKS

Esteban Lebrun naturally took the lead of the team. With kindness, firmness, and impartiality, he managed to coordinate every pole of the team to build a homogenous project. With the help of Angelo Cardoso Batista, he designed the scientific project (bibliography, constructions). He also helped defining the experimental strategy (workflow, primers, strains…), lead the public relations, took care of most of the administrative tasks, took our photographies and designed the interactive rug. Finally, he continued the BioLab project which was initiated by the last year team.

COMMUNICATION

Suzanne Phengsay was our illustrator and head of the Communication. She designed and drawn all our posters, chibis, banners and goodies. She managed to give a nice visual identity to our team and she directed the social networks. She also contributed to the creation of equipments for the events, such as the interactive rug. Finally, she stayed relaxed facing the team leader’s expectations.

Yann Bourgues was our web designer. He created our team website and our wiki structure and he introduced the other members to HTML. He was also involved in the communication team.

HUMAN PRACTICES

Yassine Ajlil was the head of Human Practices. He met professionals from different fields to investigate the viability of our project and find applications for it. He worked on improving previous iGEM projects thanks to our project. I found how to integrate the Human Practices into the scientific project.

Adèle Mazelin was the head of the Events. She took care of the administrative tasks related to the events and created media and activities to popularise synthetic biology and inform the general public about iGEM. She lead the creation of equipments for the events.

Solène Castanier was our Swiss army knife. She contributed to the communication on social networks, she participated in the Events and the creation of equipments for the events and she worked in the wet lab. She also managed to control the team leader’s ego.

Léa Rauscher was our legal expert. She worked on the Human Practices and did the Legal and Ethical aspect of the project.

Charlotte Deneaux searched professionals to meet for the Human Practices and and searched financial resources.

WET LAB

Axel Radin was the head of the Wet lab. With the advisors’ help, he defined the experimental strategy (workflow, primers, strains…), the management of the experiments (planning, coordination of the team members, etc…) and the management of the wetlab (set up, protocols writing and optimization, stocks), and he did the experimental work in the lab. He also participated in the events.

Paul Ahavi was in charge of the accounts management and the many orders we did. He also actively managed the sponsoring and interacted with potential partners. Besides, he was extremely involved in the experimental work and lead the Interlab Measurement Study.

Paul Del Rincon has been involved in the experimental work and took care of the stocks. He provided advices to young team members about good practices in the lab. With the help of Julien Fabregue, he also translated in French a booklet to teach synthetic biology as part of a collaboration with the Washington 2018 team.

Angelo Cardoso Batista has been involved in the experimental work. He also imagined and developed our video game and managed to do the Storytelling for the project. He contributed to the designing of the parts.

Marine Podevin helped in the experimental work. She also participated in the events and the Human Practices, searching for meetings with professionals.

Sambavi Markandu, Nada Fanjaoui and Khawla Achoch helped in the experimental work. They also participated in the events.

Camille Monteil helped in the experimental work, especially in the Interlab Measurement Study.

MODELLING

Sara Sadat Aghamiri and Azim-Berdy Besya were in charge of the Modelling part. They managed to understand the interaction between the peptide and its receptor as well as the interaction between the receptor and its DNA binding site. They also designed a template to study the structure of the receptor which can be used to study other transcription factors.

Instead of that, all the members have been involved in the brainstorming to find an interesting project, such as Clémence Deiber, Océane Guedj and Saran Pankaew who would not have been able to continue the project with us.