IGEM:University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK/2009/Notebook/NRP-UEA-Norwich iGEM/2013/06/19

Week Three

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Floor Two Today in the lab we ran a gel of the restriction digest products from the previous day fig 1. We used a Hyper Ladder as a marker and ran uncut DNA for both the J04450 and AntGP plasmids as controls in lanes 1 and 2 respectively. Upon inspection of the gel, it was not clear which band contained the DNA we needed to extract. We had expected to see two bands for both the J04450 and antGPneo plasmid, but there were three. This meant the incorrect band was chosen to extract the large fragment DNA from the J04450 plasmid digest. After discussion, it was decided that the best option would be to perform the digests again and run the gel for those on the following morning. Fig 1: Analysis of Restriction digest products: Plasmids J04450 (lanes 3,4,5) and AntGP (lanes 6 and 8) both cut with EcoR1 and Pst1. Outreach At 4pm, there was a team meeting where we produced a general agenda for all following team meetings. The rest of the team were told of lab developments on floor two and we were excited to hear of the sediments samples we were going to recieve from south china sea and the north alantic ocean, after our successful application to a french lab group. Some concerns were expressed about the possibility of introducing unknown pathogens from global sediment/soil samples into the labs. We are currently seeking some more advice about this from our advisors. The team thought for the first time about problems of intellectual property, given that our project has a very small but real chance of identifying biological components that could be used to engineer novel anti-biotics. We have currently been sending out soil sampling packs to schools, nature reserves, and other iGEM teams. Yet we have not provided a document that makes clear the ownership of any of the results of these samples. We are now seeking advice from Georgina Pope of the universities Research and Enterprise department for further guidance on this. Hopefully we can provide a document that makes clear both intellectual property and health and safety considerations. We have been in contact with a local magazine called ‘Triangle’. The monthly magazine is distributed to around 12,500 locals. Considerations about intellectual property of the soil samples, and also the timing of the magazine release date have made us reconsider. We may still use the magazine to advertise the Forum event.