Team:UC Chile/Cyano/Notepad/week23

August 6 - August 12

Monday: Today was Simon's return to the world (yep, he's back and brought us chocolate). Early in the morning we had our third meeting with Copenhagen team. Valencia couldn't make it again. Nothing has changed much since Copenhagen still has problems with the assembly technique (USER cloning). We are going to stay in touch by e-mail with both teams and will schedule another meeting once they have constructs ready.

Also, transformation of E. coli with Lux Brick took place to try our franky's chick sensor.

We did a PCR colony of the bacteria with C1.1, C1.2, Pcaa3 and ADF3 and finished with a regular PCR for our constructs parts.

Oh, and Pollak is really sick but comes to the lab anyway...

Tuesday: So today we tried out our franky's chick light sensor. It works ok under environmental light and in the dark room. We reinoculated our lux coli (sob medium) to test the arduino's sensitivity under bacterial light tomorrow.

WE HAVE CONSTRUCT 1.1 READY! After the selection by colony PCR of constructs assembled last wednesday, we digested them and colony number 8 of C1.1 is the right size. YEAH! The rest of colony PCR's although (wednesday's C1.2 and the friday assemblies) were... well, bad results.

Oh, and we discovered our beautiful syne that was growing in the lab downstairs seems to be cough cough dead cough cough. They die with glucose... We reinoculated our stock for a new transformation and left coli growing with the target construct (psbAB + GFP).

Finally did a PCR run to amplify parts for constructs C1.2, Pcaa3 and ADF3 and several Lux parts.

Wednesday: Today was arduino day finally. We could try the system sensitivity to bacterial light and turns out franky's chick (the light sensor) can measure intensity pretty well. Also, a short experiment was done. We prepared several flasks with e. coli with Lux brick in sob medium and we added different concentrations of glucose to the different flasks (prior arabinose induction). The objective was to find the optimum concentration of glucose able to produce biolumniscence. You can check the details of the experiment in the Results section.

From now on, entries by crazyengineer will be way shorter! u.u It was awesome to write the notebook, but enginering faculty is sucking up the blood out of me (remember we are in working term here in Chile) and as the final days are approaching some other stuff needs to be finished e.g. a shining cyanobacterial lamp.