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Team:KULeuven/Notebook
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Week 1
The first week in the wet lab started with the preparation of materials needed in future experiments. We made growth medium and agar plates containing antibiotics, which will be used to culture bacteria. Furthermore competent cells were prepared with the CaCl2 – method. We also resuspended the DNA of the biobricks necessary for our project as described in the iGEM guidelines. We managed to perform the first transformations with the competent cells and the resuspended DNA and thus concluded that the competent cells were functional.
Week 2
This week we wanted to purify the plasmid DNA from the bacteria grown in the first week. To do this we inoculated growth medium with antibiotics and a single colony. These cultures were incubated overnight at 37°C followed by a minipreparation to purify the DNA from the bacteria. Due to the low DNA yield we decided to repeat the minipreparation. This repetition succeeded in producing higher DNA concentrations.
Week 3
The goal this week was to bring different biobricks together in one plasmid (=ligation). We started with restriction of the biobricks that had been miniprepped the previous week. Some biobricks were successfully cut by the restriction enzymes whilst others weren’t. We performed gel purifications on the restricted fragments. However this didn’t result in high enough concentrations to start the ligation of biobricks.
Week 1
We installed the Matlab software and Simbiology toolkit, we watched some tutorial ‘webinars’ from Mathworks. In a meeting with the advisors, we learned more about the purpose and basics of modeling in synthetic biology. After downloading the projects of previous year teams of the KUleuven to understand the inner workings of their model.
Week 2
We made our own model in Simbiology of the freeze-antifreeze system. We still have to implement the kinetic parameters of the whole system to predict the outcome of the wet lab experiments. We wait for the promoters linked to GFP, synthesized in the wet lab, to check the kinetics of the promoters.
Week 3
Place text of third week modelling category.
Week 1
The first day we divided the work. We decided to divide ourselves in smaller teams. Bakul, Katrien and Alice (we) chose to work on safety, ethics and education. We started with brainstorming; we were looking for an original idea for presenting the safety problems. After finding a good concept we read several papers. From Wednesday until Friday we worked really hard on writing a text about all the dangers our organism could entail. Tuesday, the 5th of July Eurogentec and Delphi Genetics gave us an interesting presentation about their companies and what they do. Afterwards we talked about our projects and they gave us interesting insides and offered to help us when needed. We are very thankful and I hope to visit their lab in the future.
Week 2
When we finished writing the final safety text, it was passed in to the design team to put it on the website. Afterwards, we started working on the ethics and education part. We wanted to create something outstanding and interactive which hadn’t been done before. That’s why we came up with the idea to make a small movie about Chris and Stefan who aren’t familiar with synthetic biology and GMO’s. We formed three different groups of people to work with: youngsters (app. twelve years old), student of several universities and seniors.
Week 3
This week, we’ve worked on our debate. The organization of this event is not going smoothly but we will not give up!
