Crucial Deadlines week - Week 10

30th August - 5th September

This week was a very decisive week indeed, we had to overcome several obstacles, one being the possibility of losing one of our main sponsorship bids. Nevertheless, we had to do some urgent reshuffling of tasks and have now unleashed a new wave of sponsorship haggling biopharmaceutical companies, be prepared!!!

Day 1 without the biochemists! Alas the time has come for us Biochemical Engineers to take over the lab work due to the departure of our biochemists. It just so happened that there was also a tube strike this same day, but no, this was not going to stop us!

But on a serious note, our plan for the week was to successfully transform the RBS-pTAC part into component cells. We carried out the usual transformation protocol where we streaked the part onto nutrient agar plates and then left them overnight. But the following day there was no growth at all, not even on the positive control. And so we measured the concentration of the part using the Nanodrop . We concluded that even though the concentration was in the region of 5g/L, that was sufficient to carry on with the transformation. The part was meant to be in a Kanamycin backbone so it made us wonder maybe that was not the case and it may have been placed in another backbone by the biochemists. We then decided to repeat the experiment this time using multiple plates, 1xAmpicillin, 1xKanamycin, 1xChlorophenical. This time, we successfully transformed the parts in the Kanamycin agar plate. These parts were essential as we planned on fermenting them the week after.

In terms of modelling, Elena was cracking away at that, she set up meetings with several senior lecturers and pHD students to help with the various aspects of our circuit that needed modelling. Plans were being made to attempt to model the economic aspects behind our project.

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