From 2011.igem.org

Diary

• Week1
• Week2
• Week3
• Week4
• Week5
• Week6
• Week7
• Week8
• Week9

Week1: Monday 1st - Sunday 7th August

Some members visited Todaiji-Gakuen high school(東大寺学園) to lecture about iGEM and our research. A lot of students participated in our lecture and they seemed to get interested in biochemistry and iGEM. Their pure curiosity reminded us of our past high school days and we re-realized the interests of science.

Thursday
Team luminescence started breeding flies. The flies(Drosophila Melanogaster) were provided by Professor Fuse.

Week2: Monday 8th - Sunday 14th August

Week3: Monday 15th - Sunday 21th August

Today, 16th of August, is a very important day for the people living in Kyoto, because the historical fire festival called 'Gozan-no-Okuribi' is held. The original purpose of this festival is to pray for the deceased. Just five months ago, about 20,000 people died in the devastating earthquake and tunami. And so many people are still struggling to live in the affected area. Moreover, the situation of Fukushima is also totally unresolved. This disaster robbed us of a lot of precious memories, lovers and peaceful daily lives. However, at the same time, it reminded us of the importance of the bonding with friends or families, and also gave us the good opportunity to rethink about nuclear power plants.
We would like to pray for the victims.

Wednesday
Rakunan high school is the second place we visited for the lecture of Human Practice. The number of the participants were small compared with the first lecture at Todaiji-Gakuen, but the students listened hard to our lecture.

Thursday
Group luminescence assembled the first experimental system to research the phototaxis of flies. However, the response of flies was not clear and we could not get respectable results.

Week4: Monday 22th - Sunday 28th August

Tuesday
Group luminescence made improvements on the first experimental system, and assembled this Y-shaped maze. The behavior of fly was observed more easily than the first one.

Week5: Monday 29th August - Sunday 4th September

Today, the regular meeting of iGEM Japan was held at Kyoto University, our home. The participating universities are the University of Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Osaka University, and us, Kyoto University. Each participants made presentation on the progress of their projects, and discussed each others animatedly.

Tuesday
The weekly meeting

Wednesday
Kusaba, leader of group luminescence, is looking for some good references about phototaxis of Drosophila and insects.

Week6: Monday 5th September - Sunday 11th September

Tuesday

Group Luminescence started the improved experiment of fly. Flies were not active enough in the last experiment, so we decided to use the young flies 3 or 4 days old.

On 18:30, the weekly meeting started. After we verified progress situation of each groups, discussed about the wiki editing.

Wednesday

This morning, adviser Kashima conducted a lecture about RT-PCR for the beginners. Thank you, Kashima-san(Mr.Kashima)!

Week7: Monday 12th September - Sunday 18th September

Monday
Our activity to promote iGEM as a part of Human Practice is not limited in Kansai area. Today, we visited Tokyo and lecutred at Hibiya high school.

Week8: Monday 19th September - Sunday 25th September

Week9: Monday 26th September - Sunday 2nd October

Saturday

I（Komatsu） and Kato visited rakusei high school.
I was glad that I could discuss about biochemistry and synthetic biology with their teacher. When I returned to my home, I realized that dead-line was gradually approaching, but there were so many thing we must do.