Week Four

Monday, 7/7/14

• PCR extracted vector backbone from pKS001 with Biobrick prefix & suffix overhangs
• PCR purification of PCR product and then 1 hour incubation at 37°C with DPN1 enzyme to remove any remaining sticky ends
• PCR purification of DPN1-digested product
• Ran a gel that confirmed presence of ~3000bp-long DNA fragment in both DPN1-digested and undigested PCR products
• Gibson Assembly of the PCR fragments with the geneblocks ordered 2 weeks ago to form the 4 exportDomain-comX-mNeonGreen constructs (incorporating GeneIII, OmpA, PelB, and TorA as the export domains in the N-terminus) and the 1 comX-mNeonGreen-HlyA construct, all in the vector backbone
• Transformation of assemblies into JM109. Plated on ampicillin plates and incubated at 37°C overnight

• Set up liquid cultures of the colonies that yielded promising results in the colony PCR conducted last Thursday; cultures incubated overnight

Tuesday, 7/8/14

• Picked 4 colonies per plate incubated last night and resuspended the bacteria in 10 uL H₂O (20 colonies picked total, 4 representing each of the 5 export domains)
• Colony PCR was then run on 1 uL samples of the resuspensions
• Unfortunately, PCR products showed no DNA constructs on running through a gel
• Picked 10 resuspensions (2 of each export domain) and used them to inoculate 5 mL liquid cultures, which were placed in the 37°C shaker overnight

• Miniprepped liquid cultures grown up last night to extract plasmids
• Sent in the resulting plasmids for sequencing

Wednesday, 7/9/14

• Discovered that the reverse primer used in colony PCR last night had no binding site on the plasmids we had assembled (pTG001 constructs), explaining the absence of any bands on the gels used for colony PCR
• Miniprepped liquid cultures grown up last night to extract plasmids
  • Not all bacteria were able to be resuspended after pelleting, so resulting DNA yields for 6 of the 10 liquid cultures grown were very low (10-25 ng/uL)
• Decided to scrap the last 2 day's experiments and ordered proper forward and reverse primers for colony PCR of pTG001 plasmids to be done tomorrow

• Analyzed sequencing results and grew more overnight liquid cultures of the colonies containing properly assembled plasmids

Thursday, 7/10/14

Friday, 7/11/14