Notebook - Week 3

Monday May 14

Today we held our Battle Royale for the position of Lab Manager. Weapons included an axe and PCR. After each candidate made their speech, Andrew asked them a question to measure their competency, which was some elaboration of "If I spilled HCl everywhere, what would you do?" (side note from Kevin: "This does not count towards your consideration for the position.")

Tuesday May 15

Today we continued researching potential enzymatic pathways for our flagelar scaffold. Kevin taught us how to design primers, using tools such as the NEB cutter to check for restriction enzyme cut sites and OligoCalc to find out oligonucleotide properties.

Wednesday May 16

In the afternoon, we had our first faculty advisor meeting with Drs. Chin-Sang and Bendena. We concluded that characterization would take up the bulk of the time for our project work, and that we should use GFP as a proof of concept.

Thursday May 17

Our brain food for the day was Clif bars courtesy of Mitangi. Kevin outlined four issues we had to sort out for our chimeric flagellin project, such as removing stop codons in the middle of our fusion sequence. We also started a list of BioBricks to order.

Friday May 18