IGEM:IMPERIAL/2006/The Talk Page

Purpose of this Page

Tom is away revising for exams and John is going away to the US. This page is a place where questions are raised and answered and a place to keep everyone aware of what is going on. Also, if anyone external to the project wishes to raise a point, contribute to a discussion or simply to ask a question please feel free!

Protein Half-Lives

• Tom 12:04, 24 August 2006 (EDT): Hi guys, something to note which I don't think has been that clear. In a growing cell culture cells grow and divide, increasing the volume of cells. If the production of a stable protein was shut off then the effective half-life of that protein would be the division time of the cells. IE, as the cell becomes two, the protein is shared between a volume twice as large as the original. Thus halving concentration. This needs to be taken into account when assessing protein half-lives.
  • Although note, this does not effect AHL half-life as its volume is not constrained by the cell, but rather the fixed volume of the medium.

Prey cell positive feedback test

• JohnChattaway 05:55, 22 August 2006 (EDT): I am curious about what data this test will actually give us. It seems like you are measuring the time taken to reach steady state rather than characterising the positive feedback loop. I think that a much better test would be;
  • Make a fresh day culture of J37015 (OD 0.4 (guess))
  • Make a T9002 AHL assay
  • then every 10 mins for 2hrs
    • Take 1 1ml sample
    • Record OD
    • Centrifuge down cells, collect supernatant
    • Put supernatant on ice
  • After 2 hours this should leave you with 12 samples of different AHL conc in the ice bucket you can test these with the T9002 assay.
  • We would then normalise the AHL reading against OD

• Tom 07:07, 22 August 2006 (EDT): That's pretty much exactly what the protocol says to do. Although it needs to be adapted to look at GFP output over time also. Also it'll have to be made more clear if you had trouble working out what was going on, any volunteers? :D

Monitoring Cell Populations

• Tom 07:35, 21 August 2006 (EDT): Hi everyone, just been reading through this. Big drawback of the 3 antibiotic way of monitoring cell population that you've identified is the extra ligation steps. What extra ligations steps are involved? If you just mean grafting your parts into a plasmid with appropriate antibiotic markers, can't you just co-transform a seperate plasmid with the marker on, thus saving a ligation step? I'm pretty sure those kind of plasmids would be easy to get hold of as they are the basis of a lot of gene cloning.
  • Tom 10:03, 21 August 2006 (EDT): Actually, on second thoughts, that wouldn't work, as you'll end up losing the plasmid containing the antibiotic you're not screening for while the cells are growing
• Johnsy 11:30, 21 August 2006 (EDT): From what I understand from the team, we will use the antibiotic way of monitoring as a backup plan, in case we decide to monitor cell populations. For now, we have not decided to monitor cell populations, but we will go ahead and electroporate & Maxi the parts we might need. Just in case...
• Deepti 15.24, 22 August 2006 (EDT) -Talking to Dr. Jensen yesterday morning, it seems that the 3 antibiotic method is not very accurate an requires extra ligations steps which can be avoided.
  • Waiting for plated samples to grow will require atleast a day before we can assess the differences in population sizes.
  • The number of bacteria in the plated samples does not necessarily accurately reflect the relative proportion in the common broth culture.
  • Even if the plating method were to be an accurate measure of the colony sizes in the broth culture, we could still only record, and not control population sizes
• According to Dr. Jensen, the best way to do it would be the OD method.
  • By growing up the bacteria separately, we can measure their separate growth rates which, hopefully, should not be too disimilar.
  • When mixing the two cultures, the ODs should be equal, and preferably, between 0.6 and 0.8.
• Tom 13:05, 22 August 2006 (EDT): Would it be possible to check the population ratios after they've been mixed together using the OD method?
• Deepti 09.10, 23 August 2006 - I'm afraid not. Once the cultures are mixed there is no way to tell them apart using the OD method. Best we can do, I reckon, is ensure the OD of both individual cultures is between (0.6-0.8) right before mixing and then just hope they stay more or less equal (we will have a rough estimate of the individual growth rates of each population from the OD measurement of the individual cultures done beforehand).
• Tom 05:27, 23 August 2006 (EDT): If we're gonna be using the chemostat for the final assembley (which I assume we are), Dr. Leak made it clear that it amplifies the smallest difference in compeitive growth ability. Meaning that once innoculated, there's a good chance the ratios are gonna change.

Measuring LuxI

• Farah 12:22, 21 August 2006 (EDT): What are we doing about luxI in J37015? Are we going ahead with measuring the GFP levels in that part? Tom mentioned talking to Vincent about it...I can model the luxI but from the assumptions we've made for our current model for J37015 we ought to get a similar curve as for the AHL levels. To Tom: I remember you saying you've talked to Vincent about the luxI - what was the conclusion?
• Tom 15:50, 21 August 2006 (EDT): Yeah, we decided it might be easier and more accurate to measure the GFP from the pLux transcript as opposed to AHL. We'd still like to measure AHL to see the relationship between LuxI and AHL, however the relationship may be easier to characterise and more accurate than the T9002 assay.
• Deepti 23 August 2006: What would be the point of measuring LuxI if we cannot characterise the relationship between LuxI concentration and AHL concentration? The only way we could do that is to measure both compounds (using both protocols) and come up with a curve that describes their relationship. Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can gather, the reason for using this alternative protocol is to achieve greater accuracy than with the AHL assay. Using the alternative protocol we would gain a more accurate measurememnt of LuxI concentration but the AHL measurement would still depend on the original assay whether we use the curve produced by the alternative or not!! (Since the curve is extracted by comparing data from both assays).

Should we not stick with the original assay then, inaccurate as this may be? Unless ofcourse we do want to measure the concentration of LuxI in the system, for which I'm not sure I see the reason for.

LuxR in the Predator Cell

• Tom 15:50, 21 August 2006 (EDT): I remember when Farah and Christin assumed LuxR in the predator was constant we still got oscillations. If this is the case what is the point of LuxR being under the control of pLux as opposed to a constitutive promoter? Also, if this is the case and LuxR variance isn't important, than our design is exactly the same as the preivious MIT design, except spread over two cells. Maybe someone can look at the effects on the system of having LuxR vairable and LuxR constant?

• Farah 11:29, 22 August 2006 (EDT): When Christin and I assumed LuxR to be constant we were just 'hiding' the fact that LuxR is actually varying - as was pointed out by Vincent. I don't see the poing in modelling a simplified version of the system when our more 'accurate' model is working.
• Tom 13:39, 22 August 2006 (EDT): I think it would just be interesting to see the differences. We've made LuxR vary, and if we still get oscillations when it isn't varied people may ask why we bothered to make LuxR variable in the first place.