From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 22:24, 21 July 2011

Diary

This is our diary page which records the daily activities of the team. Click on the links below to see a summary of events and activities happening each week.

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Week 3: 18th July to 24th July

Monday, 18th July

We had a pretty productive day starting on Project Auxin. Ming, totally out of the blue, shows up with some phytogels that he seeded with Arabidopsis, a fantastic start to any plant project.
Nikki and Frank went over the presentation 3 or 4 times until it was ready to give to the team from BBC’s Horizon at 11:30. In the meantime, everyone hit the research hard, looking for genes and setting up appointments to speak to experts.
At 2pm we moved into our new labs in the Sir Alexander Fleming building, where we got a brief safety introduction and began ordering the equipment we were likely to need in the coming weeks. Claire from LSE sent over a list of questions that we have to take into consideration when we make our project to make up the human practices aspect.
Nina, Yuanwei and Si also got started on some modelling, doing some pretty impressive MatLab stuff whilst the rest of us started designing experiments that would be needed to test our system, module by module. Nikki also got started on emailing newspapers and magazines as part of our outreach goals.

Tuesday, 19th July

Ming and Rebekka met Thorsten Hamann to discuss how to grow arabidopsis in liquid culture. A problem will be organising DR5 seeds but hopefully someone will be able to help us out. They also got an induction to the plant facilities at Imperial and will hopefully be ready to start seeding soon!

Lab supplies were organised and ordered and will hopefully arrive soon.

The auxin and chemotaxis teams are working on the genetic constructs and should have them ready by tomorrow morning. Most of the optimisation is now done and sequences are almost ready to be ordered.

The chemotaxis team met with the local chemotaxis expert and got some valuable modelling advice and some general context for the chemotaxis issue. Modelling the feedback loop in chemotaxis is now a lot more advanced.

A couple of us met CJ from the Royal College of Art to discuss design and outreach options for the project. She and Koby will be working with us and we are looking forward to their artistic input!

Wednesday, 20th July

Arabidopsis team : Ming and Rebekka were informed that the DR5-GFP seed was available at ABRC. Rebekka continued her human practise discussion and Ming was preparing liquid media and sterilizing WT arabidopsis seeds for seeding in the next day

Auxin team : Chris and Nikki were finding the sequences in the morning along with discussing about the project direction and cloning strategies. They also looked for Pseudomonas Syringae and found stock at retail which needs to be PCR if synthetic parts do not arrive

Chemotaxis team : Frank designed the kill switch but not all parts were available. He also designed the agar plate assay and work on Capillary Chemotaxis Assay. Nick was working on gene construct where he figured out the RBS sequences, optimised sequences, generated constructs in serial cloner, and join human practise talk with Rebekka.

Modelling team : Nina and Si used Matlab to model the distribution pattern of Malate and Citrate concerning initial concentrations and concentrations at different distances. Also they were progressing in the chemotaxis pathway.

Wiki : Yaunwei redesigned the team page and uploaded more photos.