31 May 31, 2012

YLC collaboration: WashU iGEM has decided to conduct an outreach project in collaboration with the Youth Learning Center (YLC) here in St. Louis. The aim of this project is to introduce 6th to 8th graders to synthetic biology. In doing so, we hope to educate the students about the power of this new technology and the the real challenges and concerns associated with it. How well we achieve this goal will be measured by giving a brief survey before and after our two days with the students. We will use the result of the project to make a series of short educational videos covering similar material that will be free to the public. A first draft of our YLC teaching plan can be viewed here: (link).

This week we have begun the project by transforming E. coli with the following biobricks: 1. eYFP: Part:BBa_E0430

2. GFP:Part:BBa_I13504

3. mRFP: Part:BBa_I13507:Get Part

4. eCFP: Part:BBa_E0420

5.Promoter: Part:BBa_J23100

Each type individual gene had at least one successful transformation. The colony counts were as follows:

Synechocystis Saffron:

This week has focused on finalizing the design of the gene before submitting it to IDT for synthesis. One major modification we have made is the insertion of restriction sites between the three open reading frames of our genes. We hope that this will be helpful if we need to rearrange the genes or insert elements between them to maximize the production of our target products. The details of our final gene as well as the annotated version of our plasmid can be viewed at our projects page.