Team:Colombia/Notebook/Meetings

Meetings

June 21

Today’s meeting attendance was not taken.

Proceedings

During today’s meeting our first topic was laboratory’s groups conformations. A reevaluation of the members of each group was made and also the group agreed to send an ultimatum for those that hadn’t attended to the introductory classes made two weeks ago. Right away the laboratory’s group commented the advances made during the week and made an estimative of the goals to achieve for the next one. In order to end with the topics addressed in relation to the laboratory’s group, it was evaluated the viability of making tests of the product or at least plan its elaboration to avoid having problems in the future.

Then the “Human practices” group introduced the debate about the necessary improvements to a good development of the project for which two fundamental agreements were made:

1. Establish among the iGEM group a fee of $ 20,000 per member, which are being used to field trips.
2. Each participant must attend to at least one “Human practices” group meeting. To facilitate this it was agreed to make a scheme with the future events in order to provide the possibility to each group participant of choosing the tasks that they will help with.

On the other hand, the new structure of the Wiki was exposed and a participant of each group was designated to make, appropriately, each section of it. Besides, it was asked to the new members of the group to make a profile based on the previous years’ profiles. Apart from this, it was asked to all the participants to be responsible when it comes to upload periodically the information with the advances made by their respective group in a coordinated way.

Finally, Gabriel exposed his idea of adding to the website his talk at the “Universidad de la Sabana” so it was asked to the members to look at the video for the next session.

The next meeting was arranged for the next Tuesday June 26th at 12 noon.

June 26

Silvia Cañas Group: The primers arrived yesterday (25/06/2012), This group are testing the primers!

Computational Group: Just Left the parameters, those will be settled after the meeting.

Laura Group: Almost all parts are transformed! Lets start.

ICA Group: the letter for the use of the bacteria is going to be send this week.

Vivian Group: Chitinase coming from the different organisms were cheked. All are available. The smaller one is selected to be inserted in a plasmid.

Ralstonia Group: strain 73 does not grow!. This group are going to test another 4 strains.

Human Practices: one date is changed. Please check the doodle for more information.

Topics:

1. Transgenics vs GMO (genetically modified organisms)
2. How to make a transgenic?
3. Other differents modifications.

iGEM homework Search for any ecologic relationships in Pseudomonas fluorescens . (Thursday 28 of June) send all the articles and papers found to Silvia Restrepo. srestrep@uniandes.edu.co

Design team!! community design, They want to communicate this event. They want to seek the best solution to reach the communities. Three different events. (Silvia and Laura laboratory) (Vivian and Gabriel Human Practices) (Simbaqueba and Daniela Model)

August 6th

DESIGN GROUP

There was a comparison between the best projects (iGEM 2011) and our own presentation. It was found out some weakness such as:

1. Relevance of project over country identity
2. Slides full of images, they disperse the public attention
3. There was a gap between the slides and the speech
4. The speech must be tried more times.

The presentation should include:

1. Visual help, without distractions. Simple images expressing the whole idea
2. Unified Language
3. Trailer about the project
4. Characterization of the organism, why was it chosen?
5. A good title, which synthesize the idea of the project

An activity was made to gather some ideas about the team identity and how we want to show the team.

GROUP 1 Chitoporin and promoter are already cloned into the backbone. Insert the pChitoporin:reporter in strains. Last week they did not grow up. There is not plasmid for Vibrio.

GROUP 2. CUT AND PASTE Two ligations were made with LAMFU’s gel purification kit. This week, continue with the ligations of the other parts and confirmatory PCR.

GROUP 3. Ralstonia

From the four positive clones, two were positive confirmed by PCR, and one by digestion. This week, it is going to be linked upstream with GYFP reporter.

TOXIN ANTITOXIN

ISTR with LacI promoter was confirmed, they continue linking other parts.

MODELING They are ready to perform a screen of parameters. They are waiting to have Access to a computer cluster to do this. Finishing Ralstonia’s model. They are solving the doubts with Paola.

Human Practice This was the title chosen for the forum:

Abriendo Puertas para la investigación científica en Colombia Obtención de permisos de investigación, contratos de acceso a recurso genético y colecciones biológicas

Wiki upload profiles. Deadline: 20/08/2012, FINE!!!

Legalization issues of the next strains (by Juan Enciso) :

1. Pseudomonas fluorescens
2. Aliivibrio fischeri
3. Streptomyces coelicolor.

Extraction of Chitin (Vivian) Each group must make a cartoon (editable) about what they are doing, for shearing it to the other members, It is important that all of us understand the project. Vivian is making a list to remember people to water coffee plants. Look at the Strain Collection for a plasmid with origin of replication in Pseudomonas. (Paola and Laura)

NOTE: An obligatory meeting will take place on Wednesday 15th (7 p.m). It is for discussing the future of the project, new ideas and which members are continuing with us.

August 27th

Toxin antitoxin group: They should transform the promoter that responds to CI. Paola gave them an E.coli strain, it has no problem over expressing proteins

Cut and Paste: Sensor plasmid has few parts missing, LuxI and LuxR are linked to RBS. They can be linked and put it into the backbone. Another salicylic acid part was search; it is linked to the RBS.

Vibrio: They are linking chiS to the backbone. Digesting CBP and chiA for make the linkage to the backbone. ECFP band purification was not possible; then, PCR was made to obtain the fragment. With the digestion of it, the construction of the reporter pQuitina+chip+ECFP can be made

Ralstonia: The GYFP reporter is linked with xpsR; this week they must test the basal activation of the promoter. phcA can be cloned into the backbone, it has to be confirmed by restriction. They are confirming positive colonies of phcS and phcR. Making a plasmid revision with Adriana, the use of pML123 is the only option (However, it has mobility genes.), based on the multiple cloning sites that xbal has.

Modeling From the deterministic model of Ralstonia, the results were consistent with expectation. They are making a parameters search for stochastic model of vibrio. They have to parallelize the code. Human practices

Forum is on Monday. Next people have to paste the posters in the enunciate Universities:

1. Laura A. - U. Pedagógica.
2. David - Distrital
3. Andrés S. - Javeriana
4. Cesar - Tadeo
5. Roberto - Salle
6. Daniela - El Bosque

Assistance:

1. Adriana Bernal
2. Vivian Bernal
3. Laura Avellaneda
4. Silvia Cañas
5. Cesar Quintana
6. Roberto Morán
7. David Alejandro García
8. Daniela Olivero
9. Andrés Simbaqueba

People without permission have a 5000 fine. People that did not submit their profiles have another 5000 fine (I sent the list of people that submitted their profiles).

September 6

Today we had an extraordinary meeting as long as second deadline is approaching, everybody was present at the meeting but Silvia Restrepo and Adriana Bernal, whom was represented by Juan Manuel Pedraza. First we unanimously defined the title of our project: Pests Busters! Then David Ayala offert to make the description of the project and Silvia Cañas to make the track selection, also we finish the team roaster, Mariana helped confirming everyone pending and checking misspelling. We checked the status of each group and we decided to keep working hard until September 26. Finally we decided that the head leader of the modelling temas is Daniela Olivera.