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Team:Imperial College London/Notebook/week5
From 2011.igem.org
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.
Week 5: 1st August to 7th August
Monday, 1st August
Seeing the month change from July to August has made us realize how much time has passed. It has been four weeks since we started this endeavour and we are still nowhere near where we want to be. Time is ticking away, as cliché as that may sound.
The day started off with the absence of two of our members that had fallen ill over the weekend. We missed them dearly but had no time to stop working! Nic has booked a session on Thursday to use the wide-field microscope. Operation fancy GFP chemotaxis stuff is a go. On the Arabidopsis team, Ming did what he does best (in the lab that is).
Nina and Si continued to plow through the modelling of chemotaxis. Si has also arranged a meeting with a PhD student on Thursday to discuss modelling root architecture. Finally Nikki and Yuanwei put their heads together for the good of the wiki.
Tuesday, 2nd August
Today was a good day. Chris and Nikki had a succesfull restriction digest of the backbone vectors. Chris got to do Nick's dirty work while he was in Silwood with Rebekka talking to ecology expert Alex Milku. When Nick got back he had the unfortunate finding that the bacteria he was going to use done have flagella, but its all good in tha hood because James found some GFP bacteria that move!
The modellers are in their dungeon modelling. Wiki man is making great progress.
Ming loves his Arabidopsis so were all happy they are being loved.
Wednesday, 3rd August
Today we had the pleasure of welcoming Kiran, an A-level student on a work experience placement. Frank spent the morning showing him around the labs and showing him the mystical ways of making broth. We gave him some time to get acquainted with our project before he helped Ming with preparing a whole new batch of plant media for the experiments and the growing plants.
We had another visit from the RCA guys, Koby, CJ and Pei, which was cool. We had a cool discussion about some of our human practices work as well as the more artistic side of things such as the wiki and videos.
Nick had a stroke of bad luck this morning, as it seemed that the strain of bacteria he was using for his transformation appeared to have lost their antibiotic resistance genes. Oh well.
The modelling team of Si and Nina were on top form as usual. Si finished a cool animation and provided Nick with the necessary numbers for his experiments. Nina spent some time working on the most efficient way to deliver auxin to the roots, which we should probably have a group discussion about.
The day ended with Chris sorting out the chemicals for his auxin assays and a pair of transformations from Frank and Nick. Frank transformed some E.coli with Berkeley 08's killswitch module and Nick transformed E.coli K12 BL21DE3 with a plasmid affectionately referred to as pRhys, after its supplier.
Thursday, 4th July
Today was cool. The PCR of the backbone vectors was succesfull so tomorrow we are going to gel purify and when the genes arrive we are ready to assemble! Chris and Nikki started the Salkowski standard curve, living on the edge working with acid. Nick had super awesome amazing training on the widefield microscope with the super cool dude and it was so cool. The Mcps bacteria from Spain move, yay! Frank got some feedback on the kill switch, and got very frustrated working on it... Rebekka and Ming are preparing the bacteria for uptake by Arabidopsis, hopefully it works. Nina is starting to model root growth, Si is modeling the kill switch. You can see what Yuan Wei has been up to here. The new addition to our team, Kiran, did his first transformation today.... Until next time
Friday, 5th July
Today, we presented our newest progress report to the professors.
Frank's security containment device (kill switch) design was improved by Tom's feedback. Chris Salkowsky reagent'd different auxin concentrations successfully. Nick did A LOT. He poured plates, practiced how to use capillary slides. What else did he do? He didn't do much, man. Today he really hasn't done much.
Kiran helped Nick do his stuff and set up his own experiments. Yuanwei was busy re-writing the wiki in HTML and is waiting on Koby's template help, which should arrive soon. Ming and Rebekka set up slides for confocal imaging and imaged bacteria inside roots (BOOM)! Si modelled the security containment device. Nina finished the chemotaxis modelling video and has started developing a root branching model. Nikki purified the vectors.
There was cake.
