Acknowledgements

Thanks to Macquarie University , the MQ Biomolecular Frontiers Research Centre and U@MQ for funding and support, without which we would never have been able to enter into the iGEM competition, be able to travel to America in November. And thanks for the team shirts which we will gladly wear to represent our team in representing Macquarie University at MIT.

A big thanks to Associate Professor Rob Willows , the man behind the project, Professor Nicki Packer for all your support and a special thanks to Dr Louise Brown for all of her organisation, time, support and effort in the team and competition and as an awesome lecturer, and Professor Helena Nevalainen for her expertise in experimental design and planning.

Thankyou to Professor Ian Paulsen for all of his advisory and technical support and for allowing us to use his ideas, kits and lab. And to Professor Michael Gillings also for his advisory support and for helping us to interpret experimental results and use of his lab.

And thanks to Karl Hassan for coming to Jamboree with the team!

Thanks to Yagiz Alp Aksoy and Hilal Varinli , for all of the hours spent in the lab, your awesome laboratory skills and brains! We really appreciate your hard work over these months.

Thanks to Joanna Hare , Olga Ibrahim for all the time and effort spent into getting the Wiki done.

Thanks also to Katie Mackenzie and Sangeev Santhirasegaram for being part of the team and for desiging the poster that we are taking to Boston.

And finally to Yagiz , Hilal , Joanna and Olga for flying over to Boston to represent the Macquarie University team at iGEM Jamboree 2010!

Suggestion for amended BiobrickTM instructions

The instructions that can be accessed on http://partsregistry.org/ Help:Spring_2010_DNA_distribution provide an explanation on how to use the linearised plasmid backbone. We found these instructions to be slightly confusing and a little misleading, particularly as it says "All you need to do is cut with EcoRI, PstI and DpnI to leave two ends ready to be ligated to a Biobrick™ part". Used in this way, it effectively incapacitates the ability to further use this BioBrick in an assembly process.

The protocol given (http://partsregistry.org/Help:Protocols/Linearized_Plasmid_Backbones) is one that describes how to use these linearised backbones to assemble two parts together in a single ligation reaction. This is not the same as using the linearised backbone to insert a single Biobrick™ part into the linearised vector as implied in the usage instructions.

Below is a modification of this protocol to describe how to ligate in a single Biobrick part as well as renaming the use as previously described to make the usage clearer.

Primers

gccgctgcagtccggcaaaaaaacg,SB-prep-3P

atgaattccagaaatcatccttagcg,SB-prep-2Ea

Dilute to 30 pmol/ul

PCR

• 100 ul PCR supermix high fidelity

• 0.7 ul each primer

• 0.5 ul template DNA at 10 ng/ul (Note: Do not use a sample of linearized plasmid backbones

cycle 94/30s; 36x(94/30s;55/30s;68/3:00 min); 68/10 min Ethanol precipitate (This step does not appear necessary) Digest with DpnI enzyme in 100 ul 2 ul DpnI Incubate 37/overnight hour; heat kill 80/20 min

Cleanup

•Add 500 ul Qiagen buffer PB

•Spin through a column twice, discard flowthrough

•Wash 1x with 700 ul buffer PB

•Wash 2x with 760 ul buffer PE

•Discard liquid, spin dry at 17000g for 3 min

•Elute into a new tube twice with 50 ul of TE (100 ul total)

Quality Control