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From 2011.igem.org

9/2 - Plans for Asia Jamboree

• 14 members have decided to participate in the upcoming Asia Jamboree held in Hong Kong.
• We decided that each member should book an airline ticket separately, because of the difficulty in booking seats for 14 people.
• We have reserved rooms for 14 people at Regal Riverside Hotel.

9/18 - Briefing on experiment results

• Overall result is as described below.

- It did not turn out very well as detection of hydrocarbon failed.

- We are not certain of the reason for the failure, but it must be either the compound's concentration was too minute to be detected or it was simply not produced.

- If detection failure is due to low concentration of the compound, we will have to concentrate the culture medium to increase the amount of hydrocarbon.

- TLC will not be useful for this task, so we will have to use GC to detect.

- The reason for using E.coli BW25113 is because of their promoter, Pbad. Bacteria that utilize Pbad utilizes arabinose as an inducer, and is not able to metabolize it.

• To Hong Kong, one of our advisors, Han-Sung Roh will accompany us.

• We formed teams for poster and powerpoint design, and organization of experimental results.

9/30 - Almost finished..

• Current situation

- Codon optimization failed, resulting in low fluorescence

- We thought about using triton x-100(a type of detergent) on E.coli, which theoretically will weaken its membrane, letting hydrocarbon diffuse more easily. Our advisor however did not approve of the option.

- Other options available are

1. Extraction from the media
2. Extraction through cell lysis