Monday July 9th

A lot of lab work was done over the weekend. Big up to Kevin and Maggie because--sound the trumpets--they finally managed to isolate the first constant domain of fliC! Hooray! Saturday’s gel revealed a glimmer of hope in the form of a very faint band hovering around 700 kb for one trial of PCR done with genomic DNA of XL1 Blue. Sunday’s gel sealed the deal-- they performed more trials with XL1 Blue genomic DNA, and distinct bands showed up that matched the length of fliC C1. Now, all we need is a working ligation of this gene to be sure that it is our target. To start things off this morning, Kevin gave us a rundown of the busy week ahead. Victor and Andrew went into the lab to get started on making our gigantic hoard of agar plates that we will be needing for all our future ligations. David also went into the lab to do ligations of fliC C2 into plasmid backbones. Research topics today included xylanase (Phillip), isolation of flagella (Beini), and characterization strategies for heavy metal-binding proteins (David). Phillip fiddled around with the wiki and managed to create a sweet background using a photo of Kingston windmills that Kevin took.

Tuesday July 10th

Today in the lab, we performed lots of ligations and heat shock transformations with different combinations of fmT, SmtA, GFP, fliC C1, and fliC C2. We also disposed of old liquid cultures that have been accumulating, as well as a few bottles of contaminated growth medium. A little too much bleach was poured into our liquid waste so some of us got a little heady. Outside of the lab, Phillip worked on potential BioBrick parts for catalysis, David continued updating his heavy metal inventory, and Kevin worked on SynthetiQ sponsorship. Towards the end of the day, a few of us went outside into the glorious sunshine to take some test shots for our gifs. Phillip and Beini held up a white bristol board background while Andrew tried his best to look beautiful, with Kevin behind the camcorder.