“You give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime.” (Chinese proverb)
We, the University of Groningen iGEM team, were responsible for almost all aspects of StyGreen. From coming up with the concept, running a fully-functioning interdisciplinary team, finding supporters to finance our quest and executing, designing and running the wet- and dry lab work to name some. However, these past 6 months we have aimed to push ourselves beyond our personal limits. This page is dedicated to all those who helped us along the way. We want to thank you for your time, knowledge, patience, support and for believing in us!
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PI's
- prof. dr. J. Kok
- prof. dr. D.J. Schefferss
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Instructors
- dr. A. Milias Argeitis
- Linda Dijkshoorn
- Agnieszka Wegrzyn
- Sergey Lunev
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General Support
- Lisbeth Ravnkilde Kjolbye: for providing us with many contacts to get our project off the ground
- Thanks to Matthijs’ personnel pass for free coffee
- Sonja Billerbeck: advice about the iGEM competition in general
- Siger Holsappel: general support in logistics
- Ger Telkamp: for providing us with lab-equipment from the practicum pool
- Manon Dusseljee: for financial administrative support
- Hannah Dosenko: for helping us with our ....
- Winand Slingenbergh and Fablab Groningen: for helping us with our 3D print designs
- Martijn Mensink: for support and help with the wiki
- Erwin Nieuwlaar: for help designing the wiki
- Freya Liemburg: for help with the final presentation in Boston
- Gerwin Veenstra: for help designing the poster
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Fundraising help and advice
- Chienes Metus: For aiding us in our financial planning and taking care of all of our bills
- Mareike Schmidt: For giving advice on organizing our fundraising barbecue
- Derk Bosker: For guidance in the crowd-funding page
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Lab Support
- Tau Jang: for providing us with A. Thaliana for extracting the PAL2 and general lab advice
- Jeroen Nijland: for guiding us with CRISPR-Cas9 and providing us with an extra lab and protocols and giving access to HPLC system
- prof. dr. A.J.M. Driessen: for advice about the use of CRISPR-Cas9 and evolution experiments in our project and lab access
- dr. J.A.K.W. Kiel: for helping us setting up our lab and providing us with cellulose
- dr. W.C. Szymanski: for advice about phosphorylation of cellulose and for allowing us to use space and materials in their laboratory
- prof. dr. D.J. Slotboom: for providing us with access to a plate reader for the Interlab study
- dr. A.S. Iyerdr.: for help in the Interlab plate-reader experiments and supply of lab materials and performing EGII Western blot
- Hemant Kumar: for guidance in the cellulase activity assays & advise how to improve the HPLC protocol for the Bordeaux collaboration
- Alisa Garaeva: for providing us with a plasmid for our collaboration with iGEM Leiden
- Amanda van Tilburg: for delivery of primers and donation of BL21(DE3) strain
- Buu Minh Tran: for providing us with a plasmid for our collaboration with iGEM Leiden
- Vakhil Takhaveev: for being so kind to already transform these plasmids in E. coli for us
- Jakob Viel: for helping us find -80 freezer space, and locating some chemicals
- Marisya Majsnerowska: for providing us with materials to visualise our His-tagged proteins on Western blots
- Andre Boltjes: for feedback on the styrene extraction protocol
- Ruben Maaskant: for helping with the GC-MS and GC-FID methods
- Arjen Krikken: for providing strains, plasmids, and some restriction enzymes
- Huala Wu: for providing YPD Zeocin plates
- Anna Lauxen: for instructions on the Tecan Geneos platereader
- Niels de Kok: for providing us with E. coli DH5a and BL21 (DE3)
- Marten Exterkate: for cloning advice and helping with EGII purification
- László Mózsik: for providing a kanamycin stock and general lab advice
- dr. C.P. Williams: for providing general tips and zeocin
- Jhonatan Hernandez-Valdes: for instructions on the Thermo-Scientific Varioskan LUX platereader
- Luiza Morawska: for instructions on the Olympus DeltaVision fluorescence microscope
- dr. J. Kemmink: for helping us with phosphorus NMR
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Lab design Support
- prof. dr. B. Poolman: for giving us advice on how to export styrene from the cell
- Jan Willem Meints: for helping us develop a HPLC quantification method for styrene
- prof. dr. ir. M.W. Fraaije: for advice about a cellulase-activity assay
- prof. dr. D.B. Janssen: For advice on experimental design of the enzymatic cascade
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Personal development and coaching
- Edwin Poorte: for organizing the TRIS workshop
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(Integrated) Human Practices and Public Engagement Support
- drs. C.M. Ree: for giving us tips on who to contact
- Tjerk Douwma: for helping us doing carbon footprint analysis (Life Cycle Analysis)
- prof. dr. K.U. Loos: for advice on biodegradable plastics
- prof. dr. F. Picchioni: for advise on what plastic to go for
- Martin van Dord: for advice about plastics and rubbers (NRK)
- Pieter Imhof: for advice about the production of biochemicals (BioBTX)
- Machiel van Steenis (Program manager Innovative Biomass Applications): for advice about the application of biomass-based technologies
- prof. dr. GJW Euverink: for advice about the use of sewage material as a source of our cellulose and technical improvements for our yeast strain
- Frans Timmermans: for helping us extrapolate our project to alternative biomass sources (algae as cellulose source)
- Andre Fay: for sharing his expertise in the field of biomass
- Korienke Smit and Niek Savelkoul: for coaching us about integrated human practices (RIVM)
- ScienceLinx: for helping us with education and public engagement
- Scholierenacademie: for giving us the opportunity to educate primary school students about … Jens knows this
- Paddepoel: for giving us a stage for our outreach event to educate the general population on science and our project in general
- dr. ing. G. Buist: for supplying us with materials for our outreach event in Paddepoel
- dr. R. Fransen: for …
- Jeroen Tieleman (Bioclear Earth): for giving us tips on the resource of biomass
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Outreach and Social Media
- Daniel Oostenbrink: for helping us fine-tune our animation’s script
- Joris-Jan Coenraads: for lending us his microphone to record our animation
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Drylab Support
- Agnieszka Wegrzyn: for general modelling advice and advice on flux based modelling
- prof. dr. M. Heinemann: for giving us advice on modelling our project using Flux balance Analysis
- prof. dr. S.J. Marrink: for discussing modelling approaches with us
- dr. P.W.J.M. Frederix: for giving us a group workshop on Molecular Dynamics
- dr. P.C. Telles de Souza: for helping to setup the cellulose binding molecular dynamics model
- dr. H.J. Wijma: for his support in deriving equations and debugging with the stochastic model
- Costas D. Maranas: for helping with OptForce
- Lin Wang: for helping with OptForce