Team:TU-Eindhoven/Notebook/Week5
From 2012.igem.org
This week's general work
Because we still didn't have a catchy project name, we decided to organize a brainstorm session at Tuesday evening. The brilliant name 'SOMY – LCD, Super Optimized Modified Yeast – Light-emitting Cell Display' came out of it. After the brainstorm session, a part of the team stayed for dinner and some nice cold beers. The third meeting for the Discovery Festival is organized. Our old ideas are thrown away and new and even better ideas are made up.
Our lab work
The transformation last time did not yield any colonies, neither did the transformation with the pYES/LacZ vector as a positive control. Therefore, the conclusion: either the transformation isn't working, the plasmids aren't in order or it's the yeast strain that fails to grow. We are going to transform MID1 and the GECOs in another strain (EBY100) as a positive control. So we started over again... We made the plates, we did all the transformations of the three GECOs and one part of the channels. We couldn’t do the transformation of the other part of the channels, because we used a mix which included Leu for the media, which is the selection marker of this part. While we were waiting on the transformations in yeast, we redid the transformation of the pYES3 vector with the G-GECO into the Nova Blue E. coli. Furthermore, we tried to clean the protein solution by removing the Ca2+ ions. But since someone (we still don't know who did it) added some NaCl, we had to start over. The NaCl stabilized the protein, so the Ca 2+ couldn't be released. At the end of the week, we got the results of the transformation: the transformation succeeded! We put the colonies in 20 ml tubes to multiply. We also ran a gel to check the colonies of the Nova Blue E. coli and concluded that this transformation worked as well!
About the device
After looking closely to the software of the device, at least 15 obsolete signal simulators could be deleted. By resetting a single square wave every time a new pixel is fired, we solved the '17 second problem'!