IGEM:Harvard/2006/Cyanobacteria/Notebook/2006-6-28

Agar longevity

We put clean agar plates on the shaking floor of the incubator to test how quickly they dry out. One plate is open while the other plate is closed but not sealed.

Green growth

Some of our PCC 6803 flasks showed growth since yesterday (single 2006-6-26 and streak 2006-6-26). Nick vortexed the streak 2006-6-26 to disperse the fungus poof.

Email from Susan Golden

We received an email from Susan Golden with lots of information.

• Susan's expertise lies with PCC 7942. She warned that growth conditions and the circadian oscillator may be very different in other strains.
• We shouldn't be worried about giving our cyanobacteria too much light. The more light the better. We can even keep them in constant light conditions instead of the 16h light / 8h dark cycle we've been using.
• Susan is willing to send us plasmids from her lab.
• Getting KaiC phosphorylation to oscillate in E. coli would be a major achievement by itself. We can still try to transplate RNAP and sigma factors from cyanobacteria into E. coli, but we'd be heading into unknown territory. We should make sure that KaiC will phosophorylate on a circadian rhythm in E. coli.