Team:Exeter/Diary/wk5

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16th-20nd July 2012

This week saw the addition of three new team members. Emma and Chloe have joined us for the week and they have been very involved in both the wetlab and on aspects of the dry. For a full account of their week please view their page, found through the "outreach section". Chris Hack has joined us for a six week work placement; he too has been getting to grips with iGEM, the competition and our project. We’ve assigned Chris to Becca and Alex C’s mini project "Showcasing Polysaccharide Production" to which he has shown much enthusiasm. This week he’s mainly been concentrating on the application of levansucrase! Showcasing Polysaccharide Production received a third element; cyclodextrin will also be investigated along with hyaluronan and levan production – the gene for a cyclodextrin glycosyltransferase from Bacillus sp. 1011 has been ordered.

Liam has been steadily working on the “Glycobase” following up on suggestions posed by the group to further improve his system. It was proposed that the database could include a randomise button which would be capable of producing a random repeat unit and a list of enzymes that must be expressed in order to catalyse the production of the sugar chain. The team also decided that to make the program more user friendly the interface should have a drop down menu of possible sugar names. This negated the need for error handling statements which had originally been in place to deal with conspicuous user input. With these suggestions in mind most of his week was devoted to figuring out how to implement the two design improvements. The randomise button proved the more difficult of the two due to the lack of possible connections within the database, however by the end of the week version 2.0 was working successfully!

Our wiki stronghold have been working through the nights to make as much progress as possible before Ryan leaves on his three week Olympic holiday! A general guide has been compiled and most of the wiki code has been commented to allow easier access for not only our team but fellow iGEM’ers alike.

Andy returned at the end of the week refreshed from his lovely holiday in Croatia. He’s still very optimistic in being able to get to work on the modelling of our project!

Thank you very much to Emma and Chloe for their contributions and delicious treats!