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Team:Newcastle/Meetings/10 February 2010
From 2010.igem.org
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Contents |
Formal meeting 10 February 2010
- Start time: 3.30 p.m.
- Attendance: Philip, Rachel, Zoltan, Harsh, Younus, Alan, Steven, Da, Jannetta, Richard, Neil, Jen and Matt
- Agenda
Timeline
- Everything up to the lab work is now on dotProject, except for DNA synthesis
- T-shirts and visas were brought forward by 3 months
- Everyone should familiarise themselves with it between now and next week's meeting
- Not added yet: iGEM deadlines, internal deadline for biobricks and the glass award decision
Summary of last informal meeting
Jannetta's idea
- Bacteria binding to beans, taking nitrogen up from the air.
- Need more research, need a reason to think we can do this better than nature.
- Working with plants will be difficult, they take too long to grow so it would be hard to test.
Da's idea
- Diabetes treatment.
- Could the bacteria detect the insulin/blood sugar levels themselves?
- Could test in tissue culture
- Need to look at ethical issues
- Look at the abstract of the relevant paper in the next meeting
Steven's idea
- "Evolving non-evolvability"
- Recent issue of Nature is relevant
- Zoltan mentioned a relevant paper
- Richard: apply the same idea to protein? Check that protein still has the desired shape
- A single base change in a protein can have a big effect on protein shape
- Could use transition state analogue to see if enzyme is still binding correctly?
- Foundation advance award?
More ideas
Phil
- Heavy water idea is infeasible because it is too difficult to detect biologically.
- Create DNA inside bacteria itself, would require a lot of proteins. Recombination of plasmids.
- Instead of activating DNA, activate RNA instead?
- Not many teams have looked at working with RNA, so novel.
- Look up Christina Smolke's research on RNA synthetic biology
- Foundation advance award again.
Modelling tutorial
- Will be finished next week.
- Computational modelling is useful when a system becomes too complex for a biologist to keep track of in their head.
- The computer running the model will be able to give you precise numbers, and to tell you what happens over time.
- Qualitative model: No numbers.
- Quantitative model: Qualitative model + numbers.
- We are talking about the lac operon.
- Species: lacZ-CDS (coding sequence), plac - lac operon promoter, lacI-CDS, LacI-Lactose, LacI-prot, LacIdimer, Lactose - sugar, lacOperator-LacIdimer, LacZ-prot, RNApol, RNApol-plac, lacOperator, lacZ-mRNA.
Any other business
- The formal meeting time can't be brought earlier. What can we do about this? Skype?
Action points
- Need one wiki page with our phone numbers
- Need a standing agenda
- Need a higher-level overview of the timeline for Jen and Neil: just a list of tasks, with final dates, rather than a day-by-day detailed timeline.
- To go on the timeline: Book flights, book accommodation, poster printing, starting lab, finishing lab, people's holidays, exam periods.
- Data mining for Friday.
- End date for new ideas this Friday.
- Shortlisting next Wednesday. Make a page with all the projects, everyone give a rating: feasibility, novelty, wow factor, etc.
- "Homework": draw lines between species that you think interact.
