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From 2012.igem.org

Welcome to the NRP UEA iGEM 2012 Wiki Lab Book

Please choose the relevant link to access our diary of that week!

Week Zero | Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four | Week Five | Week Six | Week Seven | Week Eight | Week Nine | Week Ten | Week Eleven | Lab Protocols | Experiments

REBECCA AND LUKAS TO WRITE SUMMARY HERE AND ADD PICTURES/GRAPHS ETC. TO LAB BOOK

The NRP-UEA team was funded by the Wellcome trust for 10 weeks commencing from July 9th to September 14th. Leading up to the start day, the team met up to discuss the scope, the runnings and the time frame within which we had to complete a synthetic biology project. It was within the month leading up to the start date that we decided to build a sensor for nitric oxide and the rest was history, or at least slowly fell into place.

At the start of the 10 weeks, we were a little lost as to what to do. Everyone had really big ideas as to how to carry out the project but relatively little experience in research. Having been a little molly coddled in lab practice, we were suddenly doing everything ourselves and find everything ourselves. Needless to say, it took us many weeks to get into the swing of things. As emphasised, things kick started rather slowly.

Initial problems we had included transforming iGEM BioBricks, DNA isolation, gel purification and ligations. In general we encountered many challenges in all steps of cloning. However, with jokes and encouragement from each other, we worked on the finicky details of the protocols, such as a flick here, a centrifuge short spin there and lower antibiotic resistance there, we improved our lab skills. Around week 4 to 5, lab work began to fall piece by piece into place. It was also around this time that our grand ideas and designs for building a quantitative and specific modular sensor came together. All in all by the half way point, things were looking up. We had successfully cloned BM and MB into the pSB1C3 iGEM backbone and isolated the DNA. The constructs were also ready to be sent off for synthesis.

Onto the latter half of the project, we still had much to do. With potentially, our first BioBricks, we set about planning about looking to ligate reporter proteins to them to both improve the BioBricks and to characterise them. RFP and CFP BioBricks that we had on our plates, were selected and prepared to be ligated to BM and MB. This process began in week