Team:University College London/Notebook/Week3

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Contents

Notebook: Week 3

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 For This Week

This week we will be presenting our progress in all aspects of the project to our supervisors, but our key aim is to demonstrate that we have progressed sufficiently to begin construction.

Monday

Training – Wet lab Today four of us (James Rutley, Bethan Wolfenden, Bouran Sohrabi, Philipp Boeing) had a training on how to make competent cells which was organized by one of our iGEM advisers - Alex Templar. We completed one out of three training stages which was making minimal media and plating out our E.coli cells. This will lead onto the second stage (tomorrow) which involves the inoculation of colonies.
Meeting – Construction/Characterisation Today we had a construction/characterization meeting with our main supervisor Darren Nesbeth. The outcome of the meeting was the finalisation of five modules which are aggregation, salt tolerance, degradation, buoyancy, and containment (the receptor module was included into aggregation module). Tac promoters were chosen for the degradation and salt tolerance module biobricks in case any toxicity is present. This meeting made our wet lab plan more solid, which will allow us to start working on our first module (aggregation) in the upcoming week.


Tuesday

Wet lab - News! Our team is proud to announce that our first biobrick ‘Temperature regulated Gas Vesicle Polycistronic gene cluster composite’ is up on the registry and can be find at the following link: http://partsregistry.org/Part:BBa_K729000 Second good news is that Prof John Ward (one of our iGEM advisors) agreed to provide us the following organisms: Deinococcus radiodurans (required for salt tolerance module) as well as Rhodococcus ruber strain C208 (contains laccase gene which is crucial to our degradation module). Having an access to these organisms assures that we are on our way of being fully prepared for the construction of degradation and salt tolerance modules.
Training – Wet lab Today we (Bethan Wolfenden, Aurelija Grigonyte, James Rutley, Bouran Sohrabi) continued on our training on how to make competent cells. We inoculated colonies from four different plates. After adding our colonies into LB medium we left them incubated in shaker overnight (at 37 degrees of Celsius temperature). This will lead to the third and last stage of preparation of competent cells that we are going to complete tomorrow.
Sponsorship - Sponsume [http://www.sponsume.com/project/plastic-republic Launched our Crowdfunding campaign on Sponsume]. Our main target: half of our project costs, £15.000.