Week 1

Monday 21/07

Whatever you have done in a given week spit it out here. Make sure you are editing and adding every day or we will hunt you down.

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Edo

Went to Second symposium on the origin of life at UCL (http://www.ismb.lon.ac.uk/origin_of_life.html) Useful things happened there: Met Vitor Pinheiro and some people from his previous lab, had a chat with Alex Taylor. Interesting to see the opinions of “truly synthetic” biologist (life out chemicals) on iGEM (standardised parts of DNA) side of synthetic biology. Met Adam Rutherford, he wants to keep in touch with iGEM teams (wrote two chapters on iGEM in his book) and particularly with UCL as it is his Alma Mater. Invited him for our debate (reconfirmed later in the week for the 26th). He coming. (yeey) Best talk by Pierre-Alain Monnard “Prebiotic amphiphiles, early membranes and protocell functions” and Philip Holliger (Vitor’s best friend) “Towards RNA self-replication Aything else happened that day?

Lewis M

Sanjay

Maurice

Joy

Ning

Pamela

Bez

Daniel

Sohaila

Georgia

Yan-Kay

Postgrads just use monday as your whole week, I know you don't all work full time and it's fine we love you anyway.

Kevin

Adam

Dave

Lewis B

Tanel

Rob

Myriam

Alberto

Tuesday 22/07

Edo

• - Found some really good images of azo dyes crystals that could do for the wiki and/or other aesthetic content (https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=azo%20dyes). Contacted Linden Gledhill (Author of the pictures) and got positive response on using his material as long as we with credit him and link to the commercial web site (Linden Gledhill Photography

http://www.lindengledhill.com/).

• - Discussed with him about a potential collaboration: he has some really good footage of the crystalisation that could do for some of our video (on these lines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWam1HlKGkI).
• - Ordered Azodyes (food colouring, non toxic E129) to try to do some pictures of the crystalisation myself with microscope at home/ one at ucl

Wednesday 23/07

Edo

Went to the lab and set up a gel. Talk by Brenda Parker "Loop the loop: sustainable biorefining and bioremediation". Notes here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-tWFSYdf2ODV0pHUVMxbW5ndUk/edit.

Thursday 24/07

Learned how to use snapgene and put together the Lisbon plasmids into a plasmid map (with fragment inserted into the plasmid the way they did it). Simulated gel of CotA (laccase) and it seems we got the right thing there.

Went to Institute of Making and printed out Azoreductase. I found a way to make it print, now we have the two monomers, I need to finish polishing them and then find a really cool printer and some money to get a really good one printed.

Also tried to print the bioreactor BUT met mike (biochemeng postdoc) and just using a jar is just so much better to have an easily deployable bioreactor, then we can print some of the specific pieces. @Joy

Friday 25/07

Edo

//ALL THIS STUFF WILL HAVE TO GO INTO THE LAB BOOK - just here temporarily to work out best way to make a lab book// Ran a gel with lots and lots of wells: What should come out (question marks are for double band of the undigested negative control) ""

This is what came out: ""

The 4 wells on the right are the PCR products and doesn't fit with what we expected, might have mislabeled the tubes. The rest looks quite right :) Doing it again on monday to double check the PCR results.

Weekend