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 8: 22nd August to 28th August

Monday, 22nd August

Today was a VERY long Monday but we got some good stuff done! Yuan Wei was glued to his laptop all day working on a Flash animation which is looking AWESOME. Chris did new minipreps of DNA we're running low on and also picked up the Krim plasmid and B. sub from the SBL lab. Nick and Rebekka had a full on day of chemotaxis assay - they used a growth curve modelled by Yuan Wei to get their cultures at mid exponential phase for the capillary assay and FACS analysis. Frank made some funky DNA ladder, serious art work, performed the BacTrap ligation and gel extracted some PCR product. Ming prepared media for the auxin experiment as well as auxin stocks. Nikki tried auxin assembly by CPEC with vector 8A and transformed cells overnight. To verify CPEC results she also kicked off a PCR with the sequencing primers.

Tuesday, 23rd August

We had another full day. Frank made gels, ran a couple of gels, gel extracted, did PCR and ordered Chinese food. Nick made stocks, autoclaved them, did minipreps and worked on a chemotaxis diagram. He is also updated the wiki. He and Rebekka talked to Chris Hirst about the robot and how to improve the capillary assay. Si modelled the auxin production and will be able to tell Chris a number tomorrow because the model will probably need to run overnight. Nina helped Si with the parameters in the modelling and made a graph with equations from literature to compare ideal conditions (root length against auxin conditions) to what we can later compare our data to it. Ming planted seeds for the auxin uptake experiment. He is searching for boxes and is taking pictures of roots. Rebekka processed imaging data and organised the human practices panel. Nikki assembled the auxin! She transformed bacteria last night and did a colony PCR. The results look good so she is inoculating culture to do minipreps tomorrow and send the DNA off for sequencing.

Wednesday, 24th August

Today is another frustrating day for modeler. We tried to model the auxin production, which will heavily inform our design, but we failed in finding out all the parameters :( However, all others did a lot of work. Frank run a gel of antiholin PCR, and then run the whole kill switch on a gel and get it purified with Chris. He also re-draft the radio show to make to more fancy. Yuanwei made an amazing introduction flash, which will be on the wiki homepage soon. Chris and Nikki mini-prepared auxin assay for tomorrow, so we will be able to know whether the sequencing is right or not. Chris also tested the supernatant of cpec culture from yesterday. Rebekka was preparing for tomorrow panel for human practices. Finally, the end of today, we all made the slides for tomorrow’s practice panel.

Thursday, 25th August

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Friday, 26th August