Team:WashU/Week3

Website work

The website has undergone a complete overhaul, with the temporary completion of the header, along with a new horizontal navbar, a reformatted home page, more pictures, and a sponsors page. Work still remains on several of the major pages, but much has been accomplished in these first few weeks to bring the website close to completion.

YLC Collaboration

The team has put together the presentation that we plan to give at the YLC outreach endeavor. See https://2012.igem.org/Team:WashU/YLC for an explanation of what we intend to do there. The team got permission from the Human Research Protections Office of WashU to give out surveys to the YLC kids so that future iGEM WashU teams can continue this project and improve on it. The team biobricked the flourescent proteins to the promoter and transformed cells with these new constructs. We got a working YFP, GRP, RFP construct. Our CFP construct did not work. We decided to use Part:BBa_I13600 to make some CFP cells for the YLC and not troubleshoot the non-working construct.

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Modeling

The team has decided to create a flux-balance analysis model in order to simulate our project. To facilitate this, the team met with Professor Tang of the Energy, Environmental and Chemical Engineering Department here at WashU in order to learn more about modeling. After that, two of the team members have begun to write the code for the model in MATLAB.

Synechocystis

The team has constructed a new and improved incubator to grow Synechocystis, featuring new lights and a crazy concoction of aluminum foil and tape to minimize light leakage. In addition, the team has started the first culture of Synechocystis for the summer. A test plate is currently growing in the incubator.

E. coli

The team biobricked the BBa_K152005 (a synthetic pathway for E. coli to produce beta carotene) to our promoter (Part: BBa_J23100) using a modified version of the biobrick parallel assembly protocol. Then, we transformed E. coli cells with this plasmid and plated colonies. If the transformation works properly, then we will have a strain of E. coli that produces zeaxanthin, a necessary precursor to make our project's end products, safranal and crocin.