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In this page we shall write what is being done and what remains to be done. <- (yeah, right)

Ok, let's start by saying that the other guy (the one in charge of bactomithril section) is the serious one. I see myself more like a sort of crazy engineer type of person (thereby my code name is crazyengineer42). While reading the following pages you'll probably stumble on things that don't make much sense and many references to star wars, x files, lost and García Márquez. Oh, and dragons, there's gonna be lots of dragons. But don't despair, some ideas are intelligible if you make the effort to think as I think. If it's impossible for you to do so, well, at least I hope you have some fun (otherwise it may be better for you to stick with bactomithril section and never come back here!).

I make up for my lack of artistic style with entertaining writing, funny pics and unnecessary smilies.

Brainstorming, dragons and a summer that never ended (Before week 1)

January

Well, after everyone had already recevied their iGEM acceptance e-mails and confirmed being on the team, we had our first official meeting on January 2nd. The plan was to define a project before the month was over, take february off and return on March to work full time on wet lab and other tasks. As we have parallel college classes, the full time means: all the time we are not in class!

First day was odd. The campus was almost empty save for us and the construction workers, January is extremely hot in Santiago and as the team members were all from differenet areas, we did not knew each other at all. We took as headquarters the undergraduate labs of the biological sciences faculty. By 11 am we already had briefly introduced ourselves . So the count was: 6 engineers, 2 biochemists, 1 agricultural scientist, 1 architect and 1 chemist. Once that was settled, we did our first brainstorming ever: we managed to fill the board with ideas (check brainstorming section for more details). The day continue to move on, we found a nice place to have lunch (the only one opened actually) and then we were done by the day. We agreed that everyone would do research on interesting iGEM projects and then he/ she was going to present them to the rest of the team. The idea was to find the common characteristics of the successful projects and apply them to our creation.

Later during the week, we became more familiarized with the iGEM environment. Besides checking on winner projects, we read and re read the competition bases and the requirements for medals. Also, the very first transformation was done using nitrate and tetracyclin reporters. Truth to be told, we were only practicing our wet lab skills and were not really looking forward to do something with the amplified parts. There was generalized interest to support our project with the Arduino microcontroller as a way to complement biology and electronics.

On wednesday (3rd day) Dani Restovic came to the lab. She is a undergraduate sicology student who kindly agreed to help us with guidance on forming work teams. This was the first instance the team members had to talk and share more personal thoughts with each other. Pollak told each person why was chosen: everyone had different characteristics that together made awesome investigation teams. We finished the evening defining our major goal:

"Enjoy daily work and make the most of our potentials in order to develop a creative, fantastic and innovative project able to revolutionize our academic and proffesional skills. Along with that, start a paradigm change in our country by stablishing a precedent in synthetic biology research. Last but not least: to win the iGEM competition. "



We decided to have a proper brainstorming on Saturday at Pollak's with the help of Dani.

The first working week ended with the visit of our international advisor Fernán Federici(from now on "the Argentinian"). And actually it was not a visit, he happened to show up in the lab just before we were leaving and took a horrible photograph of us (all record of that material has been erased) and commented a bit about our ideas: they were ok. Rodrigo (big boss, from now on Rodrigo) on the other hand, expected more development of the potential projects but as there was no real brainstorming yet, he gave us another week to think.

Brainstorming at Pollak's turned out very productive :) Cool ideas came up. Check on brainstorming section.

The next two weeks it was all about defining a winner awesome project. Unfortunately, Newton's apple did not seem to fall on us. We had many many many ideas, but were not specially mad about any. The lab environment started exhausting us (really, artificial light, no windows and 30 C are not a good combination to boost creativity). In the meantime meetings were scheduled with different faculty proffesors in other to find out more about the state of the art and unexplored opportunites. People who helped us out in at this stage: Mónica Vasquez (research on cyanobacteria), Francisco Melo (bioinformatics), Loreto Valenzuela (biopolymers) and Ignacio Vargas (microbial fuel cells).

By third week we could not take it being in lab anymore, so Simon offered his place for a last wrap up of ideas. And yes, finally that awaited struck of enlightment dawn on us: why not couple lux brick in synechocystis and express it only by night? Our biolamp was born. Another cool project was to create mithril coats made from mithril. However, as mithril is a bit expensive, scarce and unreal the material was replaced by spider silk fibers secreted by E. coli's.