Team:Imperial College London/Notebook/week9

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 9: 29th August to 4th September

Monday, 29th August

Bank holiday. WOOHOO!

Tuesday, 30th August

Today we are at full force again after recovering over the Bank holiday. Yuanwei is working on an animation to help illustrate the chemotaxis module which should be pretty cool. Our bioengineers did some wiki work while Ming finished setting up the soil erosion experiment. Rebekka continued Kiran's experiment. Nick and Frank continued their collaboration with the iGEM team in South Africa. We will be exchanging modelling information with them. As for Chris, he got to enjoy a long day of trying to assemble the anti-holin into a pSB1C3 plasmid until 10:30PM.

Wednesday, 31st August

Busy day today. Rebekka started to plant the Arabidopsis and completed the human practice panel thing. Nick did the MCPs transfer of GFP plasmid. Nikki and Chris both worked on colony PCR. Ming did the wild type seedling. Modelling team arrange a Skype-meeting with the South Africa team on Sunday 3.00. Frank kept working on the iGEM radio.

Thursday, 1st September

Today was marked with another failure with assembling the system to prevent horizontal gene transfer. Chris´s DNA yields for backbone vector were very low, for some unknown reason, also there has been problems with primers for the anti-holin construct. Therefore most of the day he spent repeating the assembly steps, using two assembly methods. Also he was troubleshooting his assembly step making sure it is not going to fail again. Rebekka worked with Nina on the poster and also she was inducing cells containing dendra2 with IPTG. Nikki was working on the abstract and has been communicating with several people to further improve our project, mainly to work out the exact implementation strategy. She was also looking into ordering some representative piece of clothing for the team. Frank had a resit, so he was not in the lab the whole day, however once he came back he was working on the radio iGEM. Si has been running program to make a modelling movie of chemotaxis of bacteria. The program takes 27 hours to run! That´s a long time. She has also worked out a new approach for modelling of the auxin production. Yuanwei was working on the layout of the wiki, which is still a bit too chaotic and difficult to navigate. After spending a day on changing the layout, the team has unanimously agreed that it needs to be changed again. Poor guy.

Friday, 2nd September

Today we had the usual update presentation for the profs, yet none turned up except Guy, Tim, and Arturo (cheers guys!). Nina and Rebekka have started working on the layout for our poster, the clock is ticking fast! Ming is officially in charge of the parts registry. Poor Chris will be spending the day and weekend trying to assemble the anti-holin and probably trouble-shooting loads. Nick did a preliminary Salkowski assay today with the cells we transformed with assembled auxin plasmid, and it worked! We got a great red colour distinguishing auxin secretion. Frank is cracking away on radio iGEM, sound-checking to get better quality. Nina and Si are working on a new model for auxin production. Yuan Wei has finished a pretty awesome animation for chemotaxis, and has a long wish list for the wiki!!