Team:University College London/Notebook/Week4

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Monday

Meeting – Construction/Characterisation We had meeting with our main supervisor Darren Nesbeth to discuss our progress on construction/characterisation and to set realistic aims for the week. Several aspects of construction were discussed. Main focus was on the detection module which was based on the human oestrogen receptor (ER). From the data collected on ER folding and activity in prokaryotic cells it became clear that it is extremely difficult to make ER function in prokaryotic cells. Consequently, we decided to look for alternatives for our detection system. However, as we already have ER on our kit we decided to evaluate its functionality at the end of the week to see if our assumptions about it were correct.


Modelling. Today we started working for our first model for degradation module. Firstly we looked for the right software. Initially we were considering both COPASI 4.8 as well as Matlab . We finally decided to use Matlab as it will give a greater flexibility to our model. The aim for the degradation model is to represent degradation of polyethylene in two different environments: ocean as well as lab. </div>


Human Practice Today we planed our activities for UCL Open Day that will take place on Wednesday (4th of July). This is a great opportunity for us to highlight the problem of microplastics to society. We decided on the several interactive activities that we will be offering to the perspective UCL students during the open day. These will include demonstration of motion video that has been created by our team members and which represents the idea behind our project; also we decided to prepare several questions about microplastics pollution to enhance the awareness amongst the perspective students. The interactive activity 'make your piece of art using plastic waste' was chosen as well; for this we will need to generate some plastic waste before Wednesday.


Tuesday

Today our lab work was concerned with agar plate preparation which allow us to start transformations tomorrow. Three team member prepared the following agar plates: LB, LB+Ampicillin & LB+Chloramphenicol. This will allow us to begin biobrick transformation.

Modelling. We managed to deduce the equation for our degradation model that is based on specific activity of our enzyme of interest which is laccase. Tomorrow we will be able to write a code for this specific reaction on matlab. The equation deduced today is only initial, as we progress we might additional 'noise' representations to it.

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