STANDARD JOURNAL

Thursday 23rd June - Told last night after going to see X-men that we need to have a poster completed and ready for use by friday. Spent the day writing poster drafts and designing the layout, as well as attempting to copy the logo we designed onto the computer. We also updated the Wiki and gave it a new navigation bar, and looked into flight and hotel prices for Amsterdam!

Friday 24th June - Spent the day preparing for a brief presentation to the staff of the JIC so that we could prove we've actually done something! Researched more deeply into possible methods of ensuring light production only in the dark. We decided finally on three model organisms, Moss, Algae and E. coli, and divided the team into three sub-teams to work semi-independently on each project.

Monday 27th June - Today, we spent the morning researching moss and received our sample of algae in a nappy! A slideshow of photos was embedded onto the home page of the wiki and then we had lunch. After lunch we carried out transformations with 5 different biobricks, where the details can be viewed in the lab journal.

Friday 1st July - In the morning we ran a gel of our Miniprep of the BBA_M30109 transformed E.coli cells. The Gel showed that we had indeed successfully isolated the plasmid from our cells, and so in the evening (LATE into the evening) we ran PCR protocol to try and amplify the specific gene we wanted from the plasmid (Cph8) We also continued to arrange the UK meet up, adding up numbers that were coming and trying to find speakers. We also added some finishing touches to the logo and placed it onto a business card for the team.

Monday 4th july - In the morning we ran a gel of our PCR products from Friday to test whether we had managed to amplify the specific gene we wanted. We also spent more time planning the UK iGEM get together, and decided on the protocol we would follow when transforming moss.

Tuesday 5th july - The gel from yesterday showed no DNA products from our PCR. We performed another PCR procedure using an adapted protocol and a different polymerase (phusion polymerase, as this has a proof reading ability and is therefore better suited for cloning). However, a gel from this was also unsuccessful. We returned to the drawing board and found a potential fault in the reverse primer we'd designed. Having corrected the error, we plan to order the adapted primer tomorrow. In light of specific numbers for the UK conference we began booking rooms and caterers. Having decided on a selection marker for algae transformations (arginine biosynthesis) we secured some arginine and autoclaved it ready for use tomorrow.