Throughout the worm buster project we have at many times felt the need for assistance or input on different parts of our project. Without those small but immensely meaningful things our project would never had gotten this far and in the worse case never been possible at all. Therefore we would like to express our gratitude to all the people that supported us throughout the project.

Project Support and Advice

Margareta Krabbe, Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University: Margareta is our new primary PI, our primary course administrator and our closest university contact. We can easily say that this project could not have been possible without her help and guidance. She has taken care of administrative parts like booking of lecture halls, labs and getting us a iGEM-hub on campus. She has always listened to our needs and has strongly contributed in creating a good working environment for the team. We also want to thank her for the work she’s done together with our Human practice group regarding the Symposium.

Anthony Forster, Professor at Uppsala University: Anthony is our secondary course administrator and have given us support at all situations, both in the lab and some subgroups. He has kindly offered his expertise and provided us with valuable contacts and materials, such as cells and reagents, throughout the project. We are very grateful to have such an experienced professor within the field of synthetic biology to support us.

Alice Anlind, Research engineer at Vidilab: Alice has kindly given us advice throughout our project. She has not only introduced us to the common problem of poor diagnostic tools applied to detect parasitic infections in horses, she has along with Bitte Ljungström and Sara Ljungström also been able to support us by letting us borrow some reagents from the lab at Vidilab. In addition Alice has been very helpful by running our samples through Vidilabs’ minION device that we couldn’t get ourselves. In conclusion, without Alice the worm buster project would never have happened and we are very grateful for her support.

Bitte Ljungström, CEO at Vidilab: Bitte along with Alice Anlind and Sara Ljungström has since the moment the project was decided been very helpful and welcoming to us letting us borrow the space and reagents we needed at their facilities at Vidilab. In addition she has contributed with her expertise about parasitology to give some very useful inputs of different perspectives regarding the worm buster project which we, of course, are very grateful for.

Sara Ljungström, Research and Developement at Vidilab: Sara has along with Alice Anlind and Bitte Ljungström supported us from the beginning by providing answers to many of our parasite related questions. Sara has in addition provided us with a possibility to get a larger perspective of the equine industry by connecting us to other parts of the industry. Thank you Sara!

General Support

Magdalena Haupt, Informant and salesman at Vidilab: Magdalena has a long experience with veterinary diagnostics and horses and she has been very valuable to us by giving us advice and feedback of our project.

Anders Virtanen, Professor at Uppsala University: Anders has for a decade played a large role for iGEM Teams in Uppsala. This year he helped us get started by providing valuable input and invaluable administrative work. Anders has now decided to step down from his role in iGEM and we want to say a huge thank you for everything he did not only for our team but also for the previous teams.

Gunnar Johansson,, Professor at Uppsala University: Gunnar has for many years been extremely valuable to our iGEM Teams and this year is no exception. With his unique expertise and experience he has provided very valuable insight into our project and also provided us with some equipment that we initially didn’t have access to.

Konrad Gras, Ph. D student at Uppsala University: Konrad is a previous iGEMer and has been supportive to our project by letting us use equipment that we otherwise didn’t have access to, for this we are very grateful.

iGEM Uppsala Association Board:, Throughout the project the Uppsala Association Board has been a constant support for the project managers and to the team by answering many iGEM related questions and giving us advice before hand. In the beginning they were very helpful to promote iGEM during our workshops.

Ylva Ivarsson,, Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University: Provided invaluable input in the very early stages of designing the phage display experiment. Helped us evaluate whether or not the entire concept was a viable idea.

Staffan Svärd, professor and deputy prefect at Uppsala University: We are very grateful for the support we have gotten from Staffan. He has several times been very positive to answering our questions regarding different techniques such as codon optimization.

Gustav Sundell, Ph. D student at Uppsala University: Gustav has provided invaluable support in developing adapted protocols for our phage display application. He has also been more than generous with reagents and supplies. Without his continued support our task would have been next to impossible.

Labsupport

Varshini Rajagopal, Instructor: Varshni has during the period June - August been very supportive in the lab by giving us advice based on her previous iGEM experience. All advice has been valuable and we are very greatful to have had her by our side during our labwork.

Adam Engberg and Olle Eriksson, Degree Project worker at Uppsala University, Rodrigo Hernandez Vera, Researcher at Uppsala University: Thank you for providing us with your knowledge and support about 3D-printing and allowed us to use the 3D printers in your lab. Your help has proven invaluable for the creation of the microfluidics chip for the separation of large strongyles.

Chandra Sekhar Mandava Researcher at Uppsala University: Kindly provided expertise and IMAC columns

Wiki & Graphical Design Support

Ana Sifuentes, Visual Designer and Ambassador to Latin America at iGEM HQ: Ana’s expertise and advice on how to navigate and customize the iGEM site has been greatly appreciated and has helped the team to much easier impliment our vision for the Uppsala wiki.

Therese You, Student at Uppsala University and Friend of the Team: Therese has been immensely valuable throughout the projects course to this years Graphical Design branch. By helping with ideas and inspiration regarding the Logo

Modeling Support

Tobias Jakobsson, Project Manager at Uppsala University: Tobias has been of enormous help throughout the project in a variety of questions, from how to take reliable grassamples, how to find relevance in the data and (more importantly) the limits of statistics and what conclusions one can draw from the patterns.

Emil Marklund, Ph. D student in Molecular Biotechnology at Uppsala University: We have received invaluable feedback, ideas and validation on how to make relevant models and improve current ones for our project. Especially his knowledge in dynamical systems and molecular dynamics has been invaluable.

Human Practice

First of all we would like to thank UU innovation and Drivhuset for interesting workshops during spring. We would also like to thank all the participants and our collaborating teams iGEM Lund and iGEM Stockholm in our great symposium held here in Uppsala, we couldn’t have done it without you. A special thank to the speakers Will Wright, Marie Åsberg, Jonas Nielsen, Per Sandin, Jens Sundström, Hannes Sjöblad, Naturvetarna and the moderators for the event Nicolai Dorka & Niclas Fahlander.

Several members of other iGEM teams around the world have filled in our survey about the working environment in iGEM. We are very grateful for all the answers and would like to thank the following iGEM teams for contributing in our mission to improve the general experience of doing iGEM.

Fundraising

Lastly, we want to thank the people who helped us fund our project. We are indescribably greatful for your contribution to iGEM this year.

TEKNAT

VIDILAB

Biology Education Centre, Uppsala University.

Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University.

MERCK