Thursday June 30th
A morning exercise of playing around with Arduino boards (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino for those unfamiliar). The engineers/mathmo's/physicists seem relieved to be on familiar territory for a change. That all changes in the afternoon, when work begins on our mini-project, designed primarily to acquaint the physical types with the vagaries of performing complicated operations on invisible substances. A GFP fusion is to be made to a protein of interest and expressed, to be visualised by fluorescence/confocal microscopy. Quite some time is spent trawling the literature (and the biologists' quite impressive memory of cellular components) to find an interesting target. The mini-project is particularly exciting, since we'll be using the powerful and fairly novel technique of Gibson assembly (well worth looking-up if unfamiliar). More details on the mini-project are available here.
Our main project thoughts are strewed upon post-its upon a large table - still no single idea cool enough to work on, but we're confident that more than one will distill from the chaos next week.
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