Team:Cambridge/Blog/Week 10

Week 10 : 29th of August to 4th of September

Monday

The human practices effort has been surprisingly succesful - tracking down a person knowing only their name and alma mater is (disconcertingly) easy with the aid of the internet, and ex-iGEM-ers seem enthusiastic to help out.

The team has had the vague (perhaps impossible) idea of spin-coating a toy car with reflectin as a demonstration of one of the many wonderful applications it could have.

Tuesday

It turns out (with some ruefulness on our part) that the sinister tendrils observed on our slides may have been due to other components in the thin film, not reflectin. On the plus-side, however, we're near-certain that the iridescence of the film itself is due to reflectin, and we're seeing some new unusual behaviours in our latest films (things like oscillating patterns - too poorly examined by us to write about yet).

A very detailed social itinerary is being put-together for the Amsterdam trip. To the approval of some and bemusement of others, no time is scheduled for sleep!

Wednesday

Good news! A careful [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_control control] tells us our much- beloved sinister tendrils are indeed a behaviour of reflectin itself. It's rather stressful researching to a deadline, and there's some worry that our pixel won't be working by Amsterdam

Thursday

Today we constructed GA18 - a fusion of Reflectin-GFP and a Twin arginine leader sequence which will form part of our protein secretion experiments. Unfortunately this was the only construct on the Gel which didn't appear as expected, we will repeat the PCR as we suspect a loading error (several of the primers were used in, and worked in other PCR reactions)

Cat purified some protein, and sadly discovered that urea crystalises so well at room temperature, it may explain our strange spin coating findings. We will add water to these next week to see if they are also reversible crystals.

Friday

Cells came from yale, and DNA from the registry, so we have some very useful bits and bobs. The cells are Bw27783 and are required for our biobrick device to work! We should be able to produce titrateable reflectin production now. The part is a promoter that recognises inclusion bodies, which we hope to fashion into a useful monitoring device for recombinant protein production.