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From 2010.igem.org

Monday 23rd August - Hello World.

Great start to the week so it seems. We have successfully transformed our pgA promoter into E.coli, which means we now have our first biobrick. Time to get characterising and have it sent off to the registry. Some of the other transformants didn't manage to grow unfortunately, but luckily they were less important. On the modelling side of things we now have the curve we were looking for, so things are beginning to fit nicely.

The plans for the day were to grow up some of the successful cells for a plasmid miniprep tomorrow and to attempt another transformation with the biobricks. Tom and Caz worked on transcribing some of our interviews in the morning.

Evening plans are to celebrate Steve's birthday at Nii's, who posted a very interesting meal plan for the evening on facebook (not one for the faint hearted). We also had a team favourite, cake after lunch.

So after a round of delicious Carribean food, we played a team favourite game of 'Articulate', which leads us to:

Quote of the night: 'It's in Wales... and you smell people!' - Nii giving his best description of... wait for it... a limerick.

Tuesday 24th August - We’re cramming!

All day Nii and Narmada looked at ways to model promoters. There was quite a lot of lab work done by Steve, Caz and Matt, while Tom stayed at home (because of the rain) and finished transcribing his interviews.

Lab work was making a pgaA miniprep, running a restriction digest gel of PACYC-duet and PCDF plasmids. We also did a gel extraction PACYC-Duet. We also set up the digest overnight for pgaA.

Evening plans were at Steve's for pizza to talk about the next week and a half of labs. Lots of work to cram into such a small amount of time now!!!

Wednesday 25th August - Busy bees.

During the morning Tom, Caz, Matt and Steve all went to the lab to carry out plasmid minipreps in the different bacterial strains and run a gel extraction with the pgaA promoter followed by PCR of the DNA. In the afternoon Caz carried on transcribing her intereviews. Nii and Narmada worked on modelling the gene expression for most of the day.

Thursday 25th August - Grim reaper.

Steve, Caz and Matt went down to the lab in the morning to carry out PCR again with the pgaA promoter, as yesterday's attempt was unsuccessful. Tom worked on the wiki upstairs, arranging the diary into weekly entries. Narmada worked on modelling phosphorylation attempting to reproduce the modelling paper. A brief break in the morning work, the team discussed how good the grim reaper would be at playing different sports. From his frequent scythe action, we decided he'd probably be quite good at cricket, but his skeletal hand might be poor for offering skills in catching. Andy of course came to the best conclusion when he reminded us that Death had been around for an eternity, therefore would probably be an expert in all sports.

Some good news from the day, our hapR promoter has arrived, so we can get to work on characterising our new biobrick!

Friday 26th August - Competent cells.

After making competent cells in the lab yesterday, Caz, Steve and Matt worked in the lab to tranform the newest promoter and gfp into the cells. Tom worked with Andy on human practices, while Narmada modelled phosphorylation and Nii modelled an ideal promoter.

Evening plans - A meal at Las Iguanas, a few games of pool at the common room and Bungalows and Bears for post pool drinks to initiate the bank holiday weekend.