Notebook: Week 9
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
The aims of the week include continuing with attempts at ligation in the lab, and the transformation of any remaining BioBricks. On the wiki, we hope to get a more detailed account of our research on the site, and continue with our new Lab book. As far as modelling is concerned, we need to create a more advanced version of the degradation model, and to create a basic model for cell toxicity and salt tolerance. With regard Human Practice, our speed debate is this week, so we want to hear the different opinions from the public regarding the release/use of synthetic organisms to combat pollution, and also explore into the ethical, social and legal issues concerned with this.
Monday 6th August
Achievement. We were successful with our Beacon Bursary application! The panel were impressed by our project and are helping us fund the workshops in our collaboration with London Hackspace.
Modelling - Ocean Model. Erin began the ocean model, which is intended to inform us about the movement of plastic particles in the ocean.
Wet Lab. The main aim of wet lab team for today was to PCR the following plasmid backbones: PSB1A3, PSB1C3, PSB1K3. The PCR was done with Taq polymerase. The outcome was that the gel of showed no bands. It was concluded that phusion kit will be used next time. The second aim was to inoculate samples from Friday’s transformation. We transformed four biobricks. There were three innoculations made per biobrick, which yielded twelve falcon tubes. In addition we wanted to repeat the inoculation of the ligation product (J23119+ B0034)because last week the nano drop for this ligation yielded very low concentrations after the miniprep. Overall we had 16 tubes in a shaker overnight.
Tuesday 7th August
Human Practice -Speed Debate: We hosted an evening of speed debating to deliberate the question “Should synthetic organisms be released in the ocean to combat plastic pollution?”. The evening was a success! Attendees ranged from all different backgrounds including Bloomberg, London Futurists group, London Hackspace and the Guardian. Check out the
Speed Debating wiki page.
Meeting - Supervisor. The whole team met with Darren, our supervisor to discuss our problems in the wet lab.
Wednesday 8th August
Meeting - wiki. Philipp and Bethan met to discuss a contact web to visually acknowledge all of the people that have contributed to our project.
Modelling - Ocean Model. The model is essentially complete but needs further refinement.
Thursday 9th August
Achievement - Good Article. The team were really pleased to find that the
Good had written an article about our project.
"
