Notebook - Week 3

Monday May 14

Today we held our Battle Royale for the position of Lab Manager. Weapons included an axe and PCR. After each candidate made their speech, Andrew asked them a question to measure their competency, which was some elaboration of "If I spilled HCl everywhere, what would you do?" (side note from Kevin: "This does not count towards your consideration for the position.")

Tuesday May 15

Today

Wednesday May 16

This morning we worked mainly on primer design in preparation for PCR work. Kevin also met with one of our advisors, Dr. Allingham in order to discussing modeling the protein design. In the afternoon, we tested different protocols on transformation of Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP) DNA biobricks into LB plates with chloramphenicol anitibiotic resistance. Four trials were incubated at 37 degrees celcius overnight.

Thursday May 17

We spend the majority of the day working on sponsorship, following up on emails sent. We also spent some time in the lab. We got red colonies in the liquid medium shown as a cloudy red liquid, and we moved on to miniprep (isolating the plasmid from the colonies). We spent our time in the lab today preparing for the miniprep procedure tomorrow.

Friday May 18

Today we worked more on sponsorship in the morning, and got into the lab in the afternoon. We performed the miniprep procedure on the liquid colonies which involved adding a lot of different solutions as well as centrifugation. We isolated BBa_J04450, and stored it in the fridge at -20 degrees celcius. We also looked at the red colonies under the microscope and they did fluoresce. After work, Kevin and the rest of the team involved in SynthetiQ brainstormed some ideas for some videos.