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Notebook: Week 10
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
With the presentation to UCL next Monday, we have many aims to complete this week. We need to complete a first draft of the presentation, and make matching t-shirts for the team. We would like to complete our new DIYbio plans, especially as last week we managed to book a lab space for the event. After last weekends excursion to Bournemouth to collect sands samples, we also hope we will find time to analyse the sand for plastic pollution. Carina is working hard to finish her 3D model, so we will have a something tangible for our presentation, and she also plans on finishing designs for the wiki homepage and our poster. In the lab we aim to carry out curli characterization with congo red and nuclease characterisation with DNAse, culturing marine bacteria Oceanibulbus indolifex and generating a new bank of competent cells. Finally, for modelling we want to generate model that shows how irrE gene, for salt tolerance, influences e coli metabolism.
Monday 13th August
Collaboration with Purdue - James was in touch with Chris from Purdue iGEM with regards collaborating on the curli module. They came to the conclusion that exchanging protocols and skyping is the best strategy to share information about our approaches to the curli modules.
Tuesday 14th August
Meeting with the anatomy department - We met up with members of the UCL anatomy department to begin planning SEM (for our degradation module) and TEM (for buoyancy) imaging experiments.
Presentation Preparation - Bethan, Philipp, Bouran, James, Aurelija, and Joanne met to discuss their presentation for the UK iGEM meetup on Friday 17th and for the UCL iGEM day on Monday 20th of August. These preparations continued through Wednesday and Thursday.
Modelling - Ocean model finished - Erin completed the final touches to the ocean model. From the data we've used, the model predicts that collisions of microplastic particles are unlikely, and this is something that will have to be taken into account when thinking about our aggregation strategy.
Wednesday 15th August
Hackspace visit - Yeping and Philipp went to Hackspace to discuss how our Hackspace collaboration is progressing. Whilst there they messaged through the Hackspace mailing list to decide on a candidate gene(s) that the biohackers wish to PCR out of our marine bacteria, Oceanbulfus Indolifex.
Thursday 16th August
Human Practice - Radio Show. - Rhiannon was on the radio show for the first time! Bethan and Rhiannon interviewed iGEM Valencia who are working on a bio-lamp.
Wiki-modelling meeting - Our modelling team met to discuss how best we might present our results on the wiki - whether modelling gets its own section or whether to incorporate our results into each individual module.
Friday 17th August
UK iGEM Meetup - The annual meeting of UK iGem teams took place on 17th August with 9 of the country's iGem groups coming together. Here we presented our progress so far, a great chance to gain some feedback on our work, answer questions from the audience that we would not otherwise have considered and brush up on our presentation skills. It also gave us a valuable insight into the aims, successes and difficulties of our fellow competitors. We also got a chance to talk with the other teams, exchanging ideas about projects and iGem as a whole.
Towards the end of the meet we had the opportunity to interview Dr Adam Rutherford, a prominent scientific journalist and broadcaster, and ask him some questions similar to those that we had previously posed at the Speed Debating session i.e. regarding release of synthetic organisms for the purpose of confronting plastic pollution. This will be part of the next installment of our gemFM radio show. In addition to the other teams, we were interviewed by the BBSRC (British Biological Sciences Research Council) about our experience with iGem so far and what we hope to get from the remainder of our project.
(and then absolutely routed the Norwich team at foozball)
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