Team:Cambridge/Diary/Week 8

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Revision as of 17:42, 15 August 2012 by Olijme (Talk | contribs)

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Contents

Monday

Got the results from the transformations today. Guess what - they didn't work. Given the cells are definitely competent (the transformation of Jim's YFP DNA into the e.coli seems to have worked), the master mix may be suspect. However, the positive control plates we made yesterday of sfGFP were plated on the wrong type of antibiotic, so we'll change that before we assume anything too rash.

In other news, Oli and Paul began thinking about how to tune our system using an outside parameter, for use with our standardized output system. It may be valuable to spend some time modelling such a system in visual GEC. See what we did here need to link.

Tuesday

Looks like our master mix for Gibson isn't working, given that only three colonies grew on one of the three control plates. We'll beg some more off Paul, which should work, and retry the Gibson reaction with his master mix. If that doesn't work either, we'll have to look for something else to explain our failures...

The fluoride riboswitch plasmid sent to us was tested by Jolyon again, this time with a higher concentration of X-Gal to try and get a greater colour contrast for our pictures.

Paul also managed to get some of the tuning ideas up and running in GEC. Surprisingly enough, they do seem to show stability, though more so in the buffered system. If we ever manage to get Gibson to ever work, it will be excellent if we can make such a system.

Wednesday

No colonies today from the positive controls, either with Paul G.'s master mix or our master mix. So it looks like it might be a problem with the DNA itself. We're going to try re-running the PCR of the positive control fragments, but we will concentrate it more than usual, as suggested by Paul. Fingers crossed, we should get some (admittedly useless) colonies tomorrow.

London approaches quickly, and we had to get on with the presentation. As learning experiences go, it was most informative. For example, we learnt that trying to do a presentation between eight people takes an extremely long time.

Thursday

Friday