T minus 5 weeks- Week 14

Monday 27th September

An early meeting with the artists to finalize our logo, mascot, and presentation.

Spoiler: Lego pieces are involved.

In the lab, we prepared the chemicals for the fermentation, and Arif was busy filling in a Material Transfer Form to send to M2P labs in Germany, who agreed to run a fermentation in parallel. Arif is Awesome. Carol went on a treasure hunt in search of a funnel, and weighed chemicals for our fermentation, but she still falls short of awesome...

WARNING: "Do not sniff the Ammonia". Seriously.

Tuesday 28th September

Today, we started early. In blue lab coats, we prepared four one litre fermenters for autoclave.

We are at the innovation suite, listening to "hide your kids, hide your wife", and getting massaged by Arif, who is a spartan warrior. We are resting after a battle with the autoclave machine, who at first refused to operate, but then after a couple of words with Carol, was convinced that it should work. And it did, but Carol still falls short of awesome. Arif on the other hand...

Wednesday 29th September

Not a good start to the day, we were now 2 men down. Omar's knee worsened and Ali has injured his head and needs stictching. Arif believes it's some sort of jynx sent from other Universities, his claims will be investigated! And before you start wondering, both injuries were football related, so we're thinking of taking up boxing next week :D.

But neverethless, we cracked on as a team by making final changes and modifications to our inspiring wiki page. In terms of lab work, today was the long awaited Fermentation Innoculation date. For the first time in UCL's iGEM history, a fermenter was to be used. And so the countdown to this historic event commenced...12 hours to go. 11..10.. you get the drift.

In terms of the vital fermentation session, we started by preparing the acid/base and pumping it in preperance for the innoculation. We loaded the 4 different starins into individual 1 litre fermenters. We commenced by calibrating the pH meter in the fermenters and this was done by taking seperate readings of the fermenter and the same reading from a seperate pH meter, and the difference was then logged into system, eventhough the difference was minute. Having done so, we took OD readings of the individual cultures before innoculation. Post innoculation, the first reading were taken and the results were as follows;

Arif championed the fermentation session, "ALL HAIL ARIF", he took charge of ensuring that a plan was laid out for both readings to be taken from 9 pm onwards on an hourly basis and also that there were people to man the all important freshers stall.

Thursday 30th September

Today was UCL's first day of the annual FRESHER'S FAYRE and this year we managed to get a stall where we talked about iGEM! This was a very big success as many first year students came towards our stall curiously asking us more about the competition and synthetic biology. It was a very interesting and rewarding experience for all of us.

Also, it was our second day of Fermentation so there were rotations between the fermentation hall and the iGEM stall to ensure there was atleast one person watching the fermenters at all times.

Growth of the cells in each of the four 1 Litre fermentations were very slow, therefore samples were not always taken every hour and fermentation was progressing very slowly.

Friday 1st October

Saturday

Sunday