Team:Bielefeld-Germany/Labjournal
From 2012.igem.org
Starting the team
Beginning in January and February members of the former iGEM team from Bielefeld started seminars to inform interested students about synthetic biology, iGEM and the past Bielefeld projects. In March the final 2012 iGEM Bielefeld team was formed of 15 students and weekly meetings began. Our team was established and it was time to find a suitable project. The first weekly meeting were more like big group brainstorming and we discussed idea, which in some cases were totally different from each other. Everyone had to inform about ideas of others so that, in the end, we all could discuss together. First project ideas were:
- the detection of multiresistent pathogens
- communication between bacteria and fungi using quorum sensing
- a bacterial hand warmer
- a possibility to detect and destroy mold fungus
- something about spontaneous combustion of hay bale
- an enzyme dispenser
Starting the project
After we found our project idea we decided to have a get-to-know-weekend with some presentations about iGEM, important methods and ideas for human practices. We also held presentations about other possible iGEM projects to extend our horizon, as there were: e.g. RNA aptamers and magnetotactic bacteria. But the most important part of this weekend was the growing as a team. We realized that we all had one summer to work together, have fun together and most important to stand up together as a team. Now it was time to organize the work and find a suitable task for everyone. In a developing team a lot of different jobs have to be done, e.g.:
- finding sponsors
- communication with the public
- human practices
- wiki- and homepage-design
- modelling
- a forum for exchange of information
- a joker, who entertains the team and lifts the mood
Week 1
Start of our WET LAB time.
We began our time in the lab with the cultivation of ''Xanthomonas campestris'' B100 and ''E. coli'' BL21(DE3) to isolate the genomic DNA to do PCRs and purify the desired laccase ORFs. In Order to do this we at first had to designed the PCR-primers. We decided, that the forward primers had to included the prefix, the T7 promotor, the RBS and the first 20 bases of the gene of interest and the reverse primers should consist of the last 20 bases of the gene of interest, a His-tag, followed by two stop codons and the suffix. Furthermore we started making preparations for the Student Academy. The Students Academy is a week-lasting summer school (9th to 13th of July) we got the chance to take part in organizing it. It is distinguished with a lot of presentations and lessons for pupils, but also guided experiments they had to do by themselves. Therefore the general idea for our experimental part was to give the students an understanding of the principle methods in biotechnology and synthetic biology by using fluorescent proteins. So the first step was to searched the Parts Registry for two plasmids with different fluorescent proteins and antibiotic resistances, respectively. read more55px |