The first week of work was an exciting time for the NRP UEA iGEM team as we officially started our iGEM project! We spent the week largely focusing on planning out our project and taking part in some human outreach activities before we can officially begin lab work. We were able to take part in the University of East Anglia School of BIO Colloquium, have talks on our project from PhD students working on similar topics, visit a fellow iGEM team and take part in a radio interview. Watch it all in our first week's EyeGEM video and read the details in our lab notebook.
The first week of work was an exciting time for the NRP UEA iGEM team as we officially started our iGEM project! We spent the week largely focusing on planning out our project and taking part in some human outreach activities before we can officially begin lab work. We were able to take part in the University of East Anglia School of BIO Colloquium, have talks on our project from PhD students working on similar topics, visit a fellow iGEM team and take part in a radio interview. Watch it all in our first week's EyeGEM video and read the details in our lab notebook.
The first week of work was an exciting time for the NRP UEA iGEM team as we officially started our iGEM project! We spent the week largely focusing on planning out our project and taking part in some human outreach activities before we can officially begin lab work. We were able to take part in the University of East Anglia School of BIO Colloquium, have talks on our project from PhD students working on similar topics, visit a fellow iGEM team and take part in a radio interview. Watch it all in our first week's EyeGEM video and read the details in our lab notebook.
Day 1
Today the University of East Anglia School of Biological Sciences hosted its annual colloquium, an event where members of faculty gather together to discuss news over the year, give talks on their research and present posters. We were able to listen to many great talks on the research that has been going on in UEA and view the posters on display, where we were able to find out which researchers in the school were looking into nitric oxide and other topics relevant to our project, with a view to working with them in the future. We also spoke to representatives from Bioline, Qiagen, Fisher Science and Star Labs about the products the sold which we would likely require later on in the project; a few representatives even spoke about possible sponsorships and working with the iGEM team more closely, and we were able to leave with a few business cards giving us a few avenues to pursue.
Day 2
Today was a day largely involving meetings and planning ahead of the start of the project the following day. We met in the morning to discuss the project and we confirmed that we would be going into the lab the next day to transform E. coli with some earmarked BioBricks. Richard Bowater and Richard Kelwick told us that they had been able to synthesise a hybrid bacterial and mammalian, nitric oxide-sensitive promoter using PyeaR and NS2E9 elements which would be the starting point of our BioBrick. We then looked at BioBricks produced by past teams to decide which BioBricks would be relevant to our project and therefore we would be transforming into the chassis; we decided on using the nitric oxide sensor developed by our advisors, and two BioBricks associated with bioluminescence.
We also looked at deadlines for iGEM and began to draft our project outline for the deadline later that week. Richard Bowater also informed us of the COSHH forms we would be signing ahead of the lab work the next day and uploaded them to our Google Drive account so we could read over them and ensure our first day of lab work was completed with a high degree of safety. We then looked at the finances and began to discuss our trip to Amsterdam as well as organising to buy a Promega card for the university's Promega vending machine. The rest of the afternoon was then spent discussing our film, logo and future human outreach events; we also found out that our radio interview would be in just 2 days!
In the afternoon we sat in on a talk from a representative from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) on funding for research and how changes are being made to grants. We learnt that the BBSRC wanted their grant applicants to consider to 'impact' of their research (both in a scientific and economical sense) as part of their applications for funding; following this talk we too will be looking at what impact our research may make as part of our work on the ethics and future applications of our work.
Day 3
Meetings
Our original rabbit-based logo
Today was our first day of lab work, however before we could do that there were more meetings to be had and decisions to be made! We discussed the concept logos that our artist, Amy Congdon, had produced. Many of them contained the image of a rabbit, an image synonymous with UEA's campus, and an image found on this very wiki. We felt perhaps that because our logo would be very much our public image, and that outside of the iGEM world a logo baring a rabbit prominently may give the wrong impression of synthethic biology to the public, that the rabbit aspect of the logo may be better as a smaller piece of the image, or even non-existent in it. We did, however, believe that the "N=ORWICH" part of the logo was extremely important and clever in representing our project on nitric oxide , and this can be seen in the finalised version of the logo all over the wiki!
Labs
BioBricks used:
. [http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K381001 BBa_K381001]; produced by Bristol in 2010, a nitrite and nitrate sensitive promoter (PYeaR) using GFP to report nitric oxide presence. PYeaR is usually repressed by NsrR, however when nitrates are converted to nitric oxide NsrR is sequestered thus preventing its repression of PYeaR and allowing the production of GFP. We can therefore utilise this function in order to show levels of nitric oxide via GFP expression.
. [http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K325909 BBa_K325909]; produced by Cambridge in 2010, a reporting BioBrick using L-arabinose to induce the pBad promoter, which in turn activates the lux operon resulting in bioluminescence. We believe characterisation of this BioBrick may allow us to build a circuit along with nitric oxide-sensing BioBricks to result in a standard part that becomes bioluminescent in the presence of nitric oxide.
. [http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K325100 BBa_K325100]; produced by Cambridge in 2010, a reporting BioBrick using L-arabonose to induce the pBad promoter, which in turn activates luciferase and luciferin regenerating enzyme, resulting in bioluminescence. We believe characterisation of this BioBrick may allow us to build a circuit along with nitric oxide-sensing BioBricks to result in a standard part that becomes bioluminescent in the presence of nitric oxide.
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