Notebook - Week 4

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Monday May 21

Today was Victoria Day, a statutory holiday in Canada, so we took the day off to rest and relax and prepare for the week ahead!

Tuesday May 22

First day in lab hurray!

In the morning we went over lab training/safety orientation, as well as completed WHMIS training necessary to work in the lab. In the afternoon we cleaned up our assigned lab bench in preparation for our work in the lab tomorrow.

Wednesday May 23

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 discuss modelling protein designs. In the afternoon, we tested different protocols on transformation of the Red Fluorescent Protein (RFP) BioBrick into LB plates with chloramphenicol resistance. Four trials were incubated at 37 degrees Celsius overnight.

Thursday May 24

We spent 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 25

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 Celsius. 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 videos.