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From 2010.igem.org

By this stage term was about to start and members of the team had very little time. Nevertheless, due to the synthesis dramas described, work had to continue for some time.

Contents 1 Monday 4th October 2 Tuesday 5th October 3 Wednesday 6th October 4 Thursday 7th October 5 Thursday 21st October

Monday 4th October

Today we received extremely bad news. We had ordered 3 DNA constructs for synthesis by Mr. Gene on 19th August who had said that 98% of sequences of this length would have a turn-around time of 14 business days. We had become increasingly alarmed as time had gone on without the order being completed. We received our first contact from them at this time, informing us that the company was having problem with one of our constructs - luxAB. They said they had split the sequence into three parts and had to start from scratch, and that it might be 3 weeks until we got the sequence. This would take us until just before the Jamboree.

We moped for a bit and then came up with a plan, we asked them to send the completed sequences as soon as possible. We decided we would attempt to fuse them to the Xenorhabdus luminescens luxAB submitted by last year's Edinburgh team.

But there was good news as shown by the image on the right. We had believed that a number of our colour changes had failed due to sequencing results. But when we assayed our plates we found that some colonies had the desired phenotype. The plate on the right shows two distinct colour types.

Tuesday 5th October

We spent much of today moving out of the lab, we also analysed the results of the plate reader experiment. Luciferin can be visualised by its fluorescence under UV light as shown on the right.

Wednesday 6th October

Our term proper began today so we were mostly busy but Paul came into the lab.

Thursday 7th October

Emily, Peter and Ben came into the lab. Ben miniprepped DNA to send for sequencing while Emily and Peter transformed with the Mr. Gene DNA that had arrived.

Thursday 21st October

Will and Peter had a long day in an attempt to do a number of Gibson Assembly operations. The most crucial was to place Edinburgh's luxAB under pBAD and then add our codon optimised CD and EG to it.