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From 2012.igem.org

Friday 11.05.12

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We had our weekly meeting. We started by going through what we have done since last week:

• Eirin:

Since last week, Eirin have been reading Christopher Andersons article. It seems like several parts of his project is similar to what we are planing now. But we still don't know if the cells Anderson used lysed by a stimulus given by the cancer cells. We have to find out if he did this or not, so before the next meeting, Eirin vil send an email to ask him.

• Ove:

Ove will be looking more at making a calender function, so we can see a calendar on top of the page and be able to click different dates. Gunvor suggested that he could take a look at the code the NTNU team used to generate a calendar last year.

• Nina:

Nina has found several new potential anti cancer drugs that can be syntheszed by cells, but she will be looking for more potential drugs in the time leading up to next meeting.

• Gunvor:

Has asked around at Institute of Physics for cancer cells we could use in some of the experiments we are planning. She talked to the engineer responsible for the cell lab, and she said that they would like to provide us with cancer cells, but it would be an advantage if we could get some bottles of cancer cells from someone who is already using them. The problem is, she is going to leave for summer vacation in the middle of june, and if she's not here, we have to start our own cell line, which means that one of us will have to spend some hours a day in the cell lab attending to the cancer cells for about two weeks, which is the time it takes from the cells have been thawed to they are ready to be used in experiments.

Since this solution doesn't seem optimal, Gunvor instead talked to a postdoc at her research group who has collaborations to researchers in the hospital. She has planned a meeting with one of her collaborators next wednesday, and Gunvor will follow her there to talk to them.

She have also sent Marit Otterlei (professor at Institute of cancer research and molecular medicine) an email, and contacted Terje Espevik, who works with confocal microscopy at the hospital, about how we can characterize the O₂-promoter using fluorescence microscopy.

We also decided that we should start looking for sponsors. We will submit an application for funds to Programme of Bioinformatics (PBI), and Rolf and Jarle is going to contact VWR, Sigma-Aldrich, and Fisher Scientific.

Eivind reminded us that it is important to come up with an idea for what our genetic construct will actually look like as soon as possible, so we can start the modelling. We decided that we will decide on an idea for a genetic circuit on next meeting, which will be on friday 18.05, at 13:30.

Have a nice weekend:-)

Wednesday 09.05.12

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I have been playing around with a wiki design scheme today which can be found here. I hope we can discuss the wiki design a little bit this friday. Also I have been trying to make a calendar solution, but I haven't found any easier or more user-friendly way to implent this than to simply use the default wiki setup. So, at least for now, I think we should just keep using this site the way it is and add updates the way Gunvor did below (and I am doing now) ;) When you have added a new post to a day, you can click the button "Your signature with timestamp" in the editing menu to add your username along with the current time and date.

Hope you are all having a nice day and get to enjoy some sun!

--Oyas 09:45, 9 May 2012 (CDT)

Thursday 03.05.12

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We had a meeting, and we discussed several things we would like to look more into before we start planning what our genetic circuit will actually look like.

Here is a list of what we decided to do, and who will do it:

• Check Christopher Anderson's article to see how similar his project was to ours - Eirin
• Make a calendar on our wiki page - Ove
• Look deeper into what kind of anti cancer drugs we could make our cells synthetize - Nina
• Check if we have access to cancer cells, and find out more about molecules that are secreted form cancer cells in larger amounts than by normal cells - Gunvor
• Find out more about the O₂-sensitive promoter - Rahmi
• Rolf was also going to do something, but I have forgotten what he was going to do...

- We also decided to have our next meeting at 13:30 next friday, and we decided to eat lunch together on wednesdays

- Rahmi came with a suggestion for characterization of the O₂-sensitive promoter:

We could make the promoter control the expression of a fluorescent protein, then transform the system to cells, grow the cells on a soft medium they could migrate into, let them grow for a while, and then investigate the medium for coloured cells.

Suggestion from Gunvor: We could use TIRF (Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence) microscope, which allows us to investigate the fluorescence in a certain layer of the medium.