Team:Cambridge/Notebook/Week3

Monday

Today we had another meeting in the morning to try and distribute jobs. Theo created a plan for an LRE Biobrick and submitted it to DNA 2.0 for a quote - we really wanted to get our DNA synthesised as quickly as possible.

Anja, Hannah and Emily had fun writing a draft article for Sterilin describing what iGEM is, what we were hoping to accomplish and what Sterilin products we had been using. Peter and Will also created primer sequences for our first experiment. Quite a productive day!

Tuesday

Duncan gave us several E. coli strains today, so we started doing real, practical lab work! We plated out TOP10 to create colonies from which to create competent cells for transformation. Duncan also brought us a lot of boxes of iGEM stocks from previous years. Emily, Peter, Theo and Anja spent the afternoon sorting through it and making towers of boxes in the lab - putting our tower building practice into use.

We also met with Dr. Summers to discuss quiescence. He was very encouraging but we have yet to settle IP concerns. He also suggested considering mopping up Rcd from a leaky inducible promoter with antisense RNA.

Wednesday

Today we inoculated a broth with TOP10. We are hoping to start making competent cells tomorrow!

Anja and Emily started planning the protocol for making the competent cells tomorrow.

Thursday

To do: prepare competent cells

Friday

• Preparing order for sythesis
• Theo aligned 300 luciferase-sequences to visualise consensus
• Peter and Theo discovered DINAmelt, downloaded UNA Fold to model Rcd dynamics
• Anja, Emily and Bill prepared chemically competent cells!
  • By spending an hour in a cold room. It was cold but worth it. We got to drink hot chocolate.

Saturday

• Fernan tested our competent cells for us and they worked!

Sunday

• Anja, Bill, Emily and Theo discussed a final template for the wiki - it is looking pretty.