IGEM:Harvard/2007/Meetings/Week 2

Perry's presentation 6/25/07

6/25 Project Meeting Notes

This week: try to boost colony count
*Potentially boost extension: perhaps increase the concentration of insert versus peptide

• As suggested by William, perhaps we should run a gel after ligation (before introducing transformation) - distinguish between circular and linear DNA
  

Nhe1 is actually a bad cutter - so when using it, perhaps we should use 3-4 times more than we would otherwise
One major issue of this meeting was the question of the value of "redoing" bacterial surface expression, since Bassette et al have already achieved this ... However, we should probably continue because of the following issues:

• Addition to Biobrick Library
  
• Different Targets
  
• Tweaking
  
• Thought: should we ask Bassette if we can get the construct?

Pursuing the same target as their paper would resemble a positive control
Quorum was also a popular idea throughout this meeting.: Bacteria sense tumor cells, perhaps causing the downstream effect of expressing something MRI-sensitive
*Quorum is seen somewhat as a fallback plan right now, since quorum is known to work and has generally been successful so far.
Fec regulatory system
*Since Fec substrate recognition and transport domains are separate, perhaps we can change outer specificity