Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the Office of Extension and Culture (ProEEC - Unicamp) for recognizing the relevance of supporting extension initiatives proposed by students from the University of Campinas. Without ProEEC’s financial support, Pepcitrus would not have been possible. We are also thankful to everyone who contributed to the fundraising efforts during the competition.
We thank NexVitro for providing a sample of TEV protease for CTX excision from the GFP-AMP construct; Biolinker for providing the plasmid pJL1-sfGFP used in Escherichia coli engineering, and M.Sc. Gustavo Seguchi for providing a sample of the plasmid p426-GPD-ScAGA1, used to develop the yeast display strategy.
We are grateful to Exxtend for providing the oligonucleotides, which met all the primer requirements in our project.
Finally, we thank IDT and FastBio for their DNA synthesis services, including the gene encoding the CTX.
Special Thanks
We are truly grateful to the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) for not only sharing knowledge and expertise but also for its inspiring legacy that inspires us to dream bigger every day. Our thanks extend to the Office of Extension and Culture (ProEEC), whose financial support and recognition empowered our team to transform ideas into action.
Putting Pepcitrus together and designing a coherent and strong project that relied on three expression systems, two hardware designs, the modeling of a pathogen infection, and a robust human practices component was extremely challenging. For this, we are deeply indebted to all specialists and stakeholders who shared their knowledge and experiences, helping us refine and adapt our project whenever necessary. In particular, we thank Prof. Dr. Eduardo Festozo Vicente for generously sharing his expertise on the antimicrobial peptide CTX and for providing the peptide itself. We also thank Alfacitrus for their generous welcome to our team members and for showing us the entire process of citrus production.
Our iGEM journey has shown us that adapting language and communicating with different target audiences is essential for the project's success. In this way, we are deeply grateful for Yohan Alves Lima de Souza, who brought Citrick, our mascot, to life and assisted us with images and design elements for our wiki; to Maria Gusmão, who assisted us with the promotional video animation; to Stephane Fonseca Emerenciano, who produced and edited a thoughtful video about small orange producers; and to Igor Kenzo Martins Sebata (Software Engineering/PUC-Campinas) for his invaluable assistance in coding our wiki.
The feasibility of such a complex project could not have been accomplished without an extensive collaborative network for infrastructure and knowledge-sharing. We received invaluable support from numerous laboratories that welcomed our team and enabled both wet lab and dry lab analyses. We are sincerely grateful to: LEBIMO/Unicamp (Prof. Dr. André Damasio), LaBS/Unicamp (Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Bilsland), LaBioQiMi/Unicamp (Prof. Dr. Taicia Pacheco Fill), Laboratório de Biotecnologia/IAC (Dr. Alessandra Alves de Souza), Laboratório de Filmes Ultrafinos/Unicamp (Prof. Dr. Antonio Riul Jr.), Física de Nanossistemas e Materiais Nanoestruturados (Prof. Dr. Varlei Rodrigues), GSD/Unicamp (Prof. Dr. Marcus Aloizio Martinez de Aguiar), LGE/Unicamp (Prof. Dr. Gonçalo Amarante Guimarães Pereira), and the Group Sistemas Embarcados/Unicamp. Furthermore, we would like to thank Luiz Fernando de Oliveira for assistance with hardware design; Gustavo Segushi (LGE/Unicamp) for providing the plasmid used as the basis for our yeast-display approach; Rodolfo Dantas (LaBioQiMi/Unicamp) for assisting us with CTX functionality tests, and the Synthetic Biology Academic League (LiBS/Unicamp) for all their support in Human Practice initiatives.
We extend our deepest gratitude to our incredible Advisors for their patience, guidance, and ability to illuminate the path when challenges seemed overwhelming. We also wish to express our heartfelt thanks to our Principal Investigators, André Ricardo de Lima Damasio and Elizabeth Bilsland, whose expertise in synthetic biology and exceptional leadership united 25 unique voices into one team with a shared purpose. This journey would not have been possible without them.
