Team:UC Chile/Cyano/Notepad/week22

July 30 - August 5

Monday: Carla is back in the lab. And Pollak didn't find a better way to greet her than to smash her watch against the floor. So now he owes her a new watch.

Also, on the Arduino road... we realize that the sensor we got last week was not the one we asked for u.u Therefore, if we ask for the correct sensor we'll have to wait another two weeks to try our arduino light sensing system. Truth to be told, we have a really tiny sensor (milimeters in length)and we really don't know how to wire it because it doesn't have any visible terminals :( Carla is going to Olimex's technical support on Friday.

Oh... and the most important thing: THERE ARE LIKE A MILLION COLONIES IN THE POSITIVE CONTROL FOR GIBSON :D (psB4K5 + sfGFP) So the problem seemed to be related with the e. clonis we were using. Now with the TOP10 cells we have our faith back :) And it's time to celebrate with good beer of course.

Tuesday: The bactomithril spider guys had a meeting today at 19.00 to check the advancement in their tasks. Later on, we had pizza time (after a very loooooooong time) and yes, Pollak's healthy life style crushed completely afterwards. :) Tama got bit by a dog (really) so she couldn't make to the lab nor the pizza. Isaac is stuying for his probability exam so he wasn't here either. Wish the best of luck for Thursday (yeah, you'll need it).

Wednesday: The day started off with a meeting with Copenhagen team through Skype. Valencia could not come. Basically we discussed what constructs we could exchange. As Copenhagen is having some hard time with the assembly technique and don't have anything ready yet, we scheduled a next meeting for Monday. Also, they kindly offered us help with the modelling part and we think are going to accept their offer. Thanks guys!!

After lunch, Max and Carla had a meeting with Rodrigo Gutiérrez to design the wiki sections. There's a lot to work to be done!!!

Juano (electronics advisor) is trying to get the light sensor working. He could solder wires to the tiny sensor terminals (after a lot of failed attempts!!) and now the piece looks like Frankenstein. We'll be trying Frankestein in the next days. As we had two sensors, the normal one will receive tech support at Olimex on friday.

Wetlabing... well, we managed to purify C4 open and Pcaa promoter from gel (PCR run last Friday... friday xd). And with these parts did a Gibson for C 1.1 and C1.2. We also did a PCR with parts for future assemblies. Day ended plating the transformed E. coli.

Thursday: Pollak says he ate a lot at lunch so now he feels lost in the world (too much blood in the stomach and too little in the brain is our guess).

Lux CDEG did not amplify... again. Trying to figure out why....

And d'oh!... our agar plates with C1.1 and C1.2 were completely dry today u.u (always always always put parafilm around them). We'll do colony PCR of what we can anyway. We received and interesting e-mail today. Javiera López, a doctoreate student at Bioengineering department realized the concentrations of MgCl2 and DTT in the isothermal buffer for Gibson were exchanged. We are helping her to implement the Gibson technique in her lab, but till now she has proven to be more of help than us! We'll prepare a new buffer ASAP.

Parts were PCR amplified for new Gibson (mostly Lux CDEG and Lux AB) and bands from yesterday's PCR were purified.

Day ends when Pollak throws coffee at Carla for some unknown reason. She believes he is conspiring against her (he hates her sweaters, breaks her watch and now the coffee episode). Pollak's defense: I just opened the door and there she was with the coffee. I didn't mean to do it. It just happened.

Friday: So... we had tech support from Olimex during the morning. Basically, they did the same as Juano, the light sensor terminals were soldered to small wires (in a more professional way of course). We like to call this sensor frankenstein's girlfriend :) (franky's chick). We'll try the arduino light sensing system next week.

Attempted another Gibson to assemble C1.1, C1.2, Pcaa3 and ADF3 (check the Constructs section for more details on these parts). We occupied the isothermal buffer with the correct concentrations this time :) Also, we purify bands from yesterday's PCR and check sizes of colony PCR done last yesterday. Some colonies are the right size.