Team:DTU-Denmark/Blog

Welcome to our blog

This aim of this blog is keep you up-to date with the happenings of our iGEM team! This will mostly include the softer side of our iGEM project. For more techical details please check out our Notebook.

September

September 17th 2010

Spaghetti and restrictions

A lot of stuff got done in the lab today as well. It feels like we are really on the right track now. My group, the Repressor group, did some restrictions that we will hopefully be able to transform tomorrow. The Antiterminator group did ligations, ligating parts to the pSB1C3 backbone plasmid, which is the plasmid you use to submit parts to the Parts registry. The ligations were also transformed and we'll see tomorrow if they were successful.

Today we also started our ”spaghetti” meetings. That included some nice spaghetti bolognese that Thomas and Annemi prepared for us. It was so good, and it was much easier to stay awake and focused during the late meeting with some food in your stomach.

September 15th 2010

Back in the lab!

When we started designing our approach to constructing our switch back at the beginning of June, I don't think anyone imagined how hectic the next 3 months would be. Highlights include redoing our approach twice, multiple tries at inserting FPs into plasmids, insane amounts of colony PCRs and lots of frustrations with the poor performance of our restriction enzymes. However, that is all in the past now. After realising that constructing our whole switch would be unrealistic, we designed our third and final plan, focusing on good characterization of our biobricks, as well as a couple of new standards for measuring other biobricks that will hopefully net us a gold medal at the jamboree! The plan included splitting ourselves into two groups, Repressor group and the Antiterminator group, enabling us to work on two very different parts of our switch. The repressor group will funnily enough be working with the repressors GogR and GtgR and their interactions with the Gifsy1 and 2 promoters and antirepressors. The Antiterminator group will be working with the antiterminator N from lambda and how it, together with the nutR site, affects a variety of terminators.

We finally received our primers yesterday and things are finally starting to happen in the lab. We've done a bunch of sucessful PCRs so far, as well as some digestions that will hopefully also turn out well. I'll try to post a blog entry each weekday (not necessarily written by me though! :P), detailing the work that has happened that day, so tune in again to see how we're doing during the last 6 weeks before the jamboree :).

August

August 13th, 2010

Hello world and welcome to our blog!

We are a team of 10 DTU students who have come together in the name of Systems Biology to compete in the prestigious iGEM (international Genetic Engineered Machine) competition. This blog will keep you updated with our progress, so stay tuned and enjoy the journey with us.

This is the second year that DTU will be represented at the Jamboree in Boston, USA. Last years team did a brilliant job and won a Gold medal. We hope to follow in their footsteps and come back home from with a Gold medal.