Team:Exeter/Diary

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The first three weeks, commencing 28th May 2012 have been set aside to obtain a general biological background, particularly useful for the non-biologists in the team, the majority! This will be achieved through several short lectures, discussions and practical laboratory sessions. This allows every member of the team to have a suitable platform to create project designs.

Ideas will be put forward and built upon with the aim of making the final decision on Thursday 14th June 2012. The subsequent ten weeks are then for us to develop our project!

28th May – 1st June 2012

The team arrived and Tom Howard, our project coordinator, began with a brief introduction to the iGEM competition. He then attempted, and in most cases succeeded in bringing everybody up to scratch on the basic biology we will need to understand for this summer, predominantly PROMOTER – GENE – TERMINATOR (only mildly connected with the 1984 hit film, much to the disappointment of the physicists, its role is still to stop the process at all costs!).

John Love followed with a talk on synthetic biology and how cool the subject area is, not that we needed any convincing! Orkun Soyer gave a talk on bio-stability which was well received by our in house mathematician and finally to end our day of talks Christine Sambles gave an introduction to the –omics.

More talks followed in the week. Clive Butler talked about Thauera selenatis and microbial nano-mineral synthesis. Nick Smirnoff spoke on metabolic engineering and this was followed by Nic Harmer talking about polysaccharides.

Tom spoke about his field of research which involves bio-fuel production, which was very interesting. George Littlejohn gave us a brief talk on biosensors and reporters, whilst Rob Beardmore spoke about dynamic systems modelling.

Our final talk of the week was given by Peter Petrov on bacterial and artificial swimming. This featured many amazing videos showing different forms of swimming involving bacteria and how they could travel in a variety of methods! Most of the afternoons and evenings were set aside for brainstorming, below are a selection of some of the ideas.