Team:University College London/Notebook/Week14
From 2012.igem.org
Contents |
Notebook: Week 14
Preparations | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Week 11 | Week 12 | Week 13 | Week 14 | Week 15 | Week 16
Aims of the Week
Monday 10th September
DIYBio Exhibition Floorplan Philipp and Bethan worked on a floor plan for the exhibition.
Tuesday 11th September
Regional Jamboree Registration The whole team successfully registered today for iGEM 2012 Regional Jamboree in Europe!
Sponsume The crowdfundraising website posted a short article Philipp wrote about science fundraising for short-term projects like iGEM: http://www.sponsume.com/blog/university-college-london-igems-experiment-crowdfunding
Wednesday 12th September
Practice Presentation Today the team presented to our supervisors and received some good feedback. Overall we really need to improve the clarity of our presentation, it's hard to concisely summarise a summer of work.
DIYBio Exhibition - At the exhibition we want to run a gel in the centre of the room. We need a box to safely contain the gel, light and battery without being knocked over. Helping Philipp and Bethan, Howard has created a design for the box that we will construct with the hackers in the London Hackspace.
Thursday 13th September
Hackspace Day 2 Together with the hackers, Bethan helped to build a shaker to agitate our cells overnight. This involved using a number of equipment only available at the Hackspace, including hand saw, glue gun and motor. The biohackers were very keen to give us an electronics tutorial as we build our circuit for the shaker. A variable resistor was included in the circuit design so we can control the speed of the shaker.
We also performed PCR of the cholorophenicol plasmid backbone required for our ligations. At hackspace, they have a very cool 'ancient' thermocycler. It has no heated lid so mineral oil has to be added to samples to prevent evaporation. The biohackers showed us how to program the machine. There are so many steps compared to the one used in our lab!
Friday 14th September
Hackspace Day 3 Our shaker from yesterday was still alive today and the liquid cultures in falcon tubes are all cloudy showing growth! Together with the biohackers we ran a 1% gel of the PCR product from yesterday using their DIY gel tray. Their tray didn't have a cover, you can also see how the wires are connected! Using a hand held UV filter and UV light, we visualized our gel. The PCR has worked! Gel shows the expected band at 2070bp. PCR clean-up is to be done at the UCL workshops since the centrifuge at Hackspace is only estimated to be able to do 5000rpm