Labjournal

Week 9 (06/25 - 07/01/12)

Team Sequencing: Sequencing of the next finished biobricks.
Team Activity Test: Today is copper day! First we divided each sample (those from yesterday) and added 2mM or 4mM to the halfs, respectively. We incubated our samples for 2h and hoped that the concentration gradient would cause the laccases to exchange the ion they have integrated instead against copper. We measured their activity again after those 2h but there was no change seen. Team Cultivation plans to add copper from the very beginning of cultivation next time.

Team A. thaliana laccase: The thing about plants is that they have to grow. Fortunately we got 6 beautiful 4 weeks-old wildtype plants from Patrick Treffon from the Institute of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry at Bielefeld University. With the help of the efp-Browser we found out that the laccase in A. thaliana is only expressed in the developing seeds. So we now have to wait for the siliques to develop.

Team Wiki: Today we browsed our wiki and were not very impressed: it's a lonesome place. So we started to think of how we could blow a little more life into it. For this, texts should appear soon on our wiki. To manage this bunch of work, we divided the subtopics of our wiki and appointed them to group members. Now everyone has a topic which he is responsible for. And that includes writing the texts, uploading pictures and keeping the represented information updated. Before anybody had the chance to disappear behind his/her notebook being busy editing his own page, we had to establish our wiki rules:
- Use the standardized formatting as presented in our example page.
- Try to edit your text without using HTML code as far as possible and use wiki code instead. Useful advices when using wiki code are represented on our example page, too.
- If you want to change anything that does not belong to your scope of duties, ask kindly the person of charge and make sure he/she is fine with it.
- Make your text more understandable by using images and charts. But remember: you are only allowed to upload pictures if you own them or if they are published without licenses.

Team Activity Test: New day, new try! The laccases we received today were from different organisms (Escherichia coli, Bacillus pumilus, Bacillus halodurans C-125, Xanthomonas campestris pv. campestris B100, Thermus thermophilus and E. coli KRX) and cultivated at 30°C in baffled flasks. Each sample was set up as 200 ml and 60 ml approach, respectively. For more details, check their labjournal entry. We measured as usual with our favourit tool Tecan but unfortunately we couldn´t detect any changes in the OD.