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.

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.

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

Did something I dont totally recall. Was definitely in school. Most likely the day I observed and did some grunt work with Tanel and Sohaila, doing transformations. Most likely worked on the new web home page template.

Sanjay

Maurice

Joy

Ning

Pamela

Bez

Daniel

Sohaila

Georgia

Yan-Kay

Tanel

Adam

Kevin

Dave

Lewis B

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

Lewis M

Was an interesting day as there was a mash of meetings, one of which was a rather important meeting with the Webcomms and human practice people. We decided on what graphics were needed for the new website design and how they would be taken and then implemented. Also we had a bit of a kerfuffle regarding the deadline of the final site. All in all it was a hectic day but a lot was organized.

Sanjay

Maurice

Joy

Ning

Pamela

Bez

Daniel

Sohaila

Georgia

Yan-Kay

Tanel

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.

Read more about big italian textile company that had issues with toxic dyes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marzotto I have get in contact and visit after ETAD

Had a look into make a chemical distance map of azodyes from cofactors found in living organisms to implement metabolic firewall for the xenobiological approach to biosafety. Will probably get a nice image with Rob useful to explain what trying to do. Some help might come from xenobiology lab at ucl.

Lewis M

Had a burrito and wrote some script. Great day. Can't think of anything else.

Sanjay

Maurice

Joy

Ning

Pamela

Bez

Daniel

Sohaila

Georgia

Yan-Kay

Tanel

Thursday 24/07

Edo

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

Lewis M

Debugged and got the homepage HTML, CSS, and JS reading for the introduction of graphics. Super psyched I got this done. Consolidated all of the designs for the new site. Began studying genetic algorithms, cause I felt like it. At this point I had a discussion with the other team members and we are going to make sure the other sites are perfect to give us some more buffer time to get the final site done and pretty. Also began talks with Edo about setting up a blog/diary.

Sanjay

Maurice

Joy

Ning

Pamela

Bez

Daniel

Sohaila

Georgia

Yan-Kay

Tanel

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.

Lewis M

Sanjay

Maurice

Joy

Ning

Pamela

Bez

Daniel

Sohaila

Georgia

Yan-Kay

Tanel

Weekend