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Team:Cambridge/Week 4
From 2012.igem.org
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Contents |
Monday
Scandal in the lab! It appears that someone at Caltech has edited our wiki, initially inserting the word 'chicken' into our project page. Then they broke our Java script - potentially accidentally. Easily rectified, but still irritating, especially since the project description deadline was yesterday. Have we been the victim of a not-so-droll ivy league-ish prank? Or is some oddly minded person co-opting this student's account? We've emailed their project supervisor, so hopefully it shouldn't happen again.
One night seems to have been too little time to accurately determine if the transformation worked, as we now have lots of e.coli colonies on the plates. The bacillus plates have not been so successful, but the plasmid was not optimized to bacillus, potentially explaining their failure. We will need to make sure that we include more controls in future to work out where our experiments fail, if they should fail.
In any case, we were able to induce the pBAD promoter with arabinose in the e.coli cells. Results can be seen in the lab book page.
The construct we are hoping to submit to DNA 2.0 has also been partially designed. The fusion of the lux α subunit and the mOrange protein has been completed, as described in the project page (link in when a little more complete). The v.haveyi operon that we are hoping to have codon optimized has also been tided up, with more appropriate spacings between the genes.
Additionally, Andreas managed to finish his Arduino device. It now gives a response that is proportional to the ratio of the light intensities on the two light dependent resistors. By using a couple of coloured filters over the top of these resistors, we can measure the necessary spectral properties of our engineered luciferases. All the engineers need to do now is come up with a user interface.
Tuesday
Apologies from the editing parties at Caltech, apparently the remaining changes were not meant to be there. Unfortunately they also edited Brown's wiki. A storm may be brewing, depending how seriously they take the changes...
Anyway, apart from that little drama, lots happened in the lab today. Jolyon recieved his Fluoride riboswitch primers - see what we did with them in the lab book. Paul and Andreas also made a short film link about their instrumentation.
Tom worked on making the construct we need to get ordered from DNA 2.0 using their program Gene Designer. He ran into a few issues, but Jim A. was able to give a few hints, and put him into contact with some friendly people in Newcastle who specialize in working with bacillus. If they don't know the answers, no one will.
