Tuesday May 11, 2010

Today, we spent the day making Top10 competent cells from the original Invitrogen source. They were made competent through the method involving CaCl₂. We considered using electroporation as a method of making cells competent but it is not cost-effective to do this with so many cells. The cells were made and will be stored in the -80°C freezer until use. The procedure for making competent cells as well as transforming DNA into them can be found in our online Lab Protocols. As a group, we came together and combined the ideas that we had as possible projects for the summer. We ended up narrowing the ideas down to:

• Bacteria producing vanilla-flavoured alcool
• Bacteria that produced cheap hydrogen that could possibly power fuel cells
• Directed Evolution as a technique
• Bacteria that detected vanilla in food products for those with vanilla allergies
• A circuit that would be able to assemble DNA easily in one day
• A protein troubleshooting kit that could be used to determine what was going wrong with a protein