IGEM:Imperial/2010/Diary/Week9

Piotr, who up until this time had been working on the modelling team, moved into lab to help the XylE team.

On Wednesday, we had a meeting with our advisors to discuss the characterisation of certain parts of the system.

The XylE Team ligated the promoter-XylE insert into the pSB1C3-B0014 vector (which was previously prepared by the Surface Protein Team). They also worked on the catechol assays, determining the optimum absorbance wavelength for the coloured product, the optimum cell density and the most appropriate catechol concentration for doing the assays.

The Cell Surface Protein Team had some problems, such as a failing to transform E. coli with pVEG. They did manage to get transformants for the LytC CWBD, but after checking if it had inserted in the correct orientation, they found that it had inserted in the wrong orientation in each colony that they tested. Working with pVEG was also tricky, because it kept disappearing after gel purification because it may have been below the threshold.

On Thursday, we had a visit from Helen Craig, who works for Furnace TV (a television production company), who seemed really interested in our project. We took her on a tour of the lab and showed her a catechol assay.