Here you will find weekly summaries of our wet laboratory progress, team updates, and accomplishments outside the laboratory. Follow this link to our detailed, day-to-day Laboratory Notebook.
Week 1
Tuesday, May 20 - Sunday, May 25
iGEM 2014 had their first meeting with Dr. Salis and Dr. Richard. Ashlee, Emily, Clay, and Sam met each other. Emily will help Ashlee continue work on her Honors Thesis with the project "Engineering a Biodetoxification Pathway for Lignocellulosic Feedstock". Ashlee began to show Emily around the lab and instruct her during her first cloning experiences while they continued Ashlee's semester research trying to add a terminator upstream of the HMF pathway where dCas9 would be inserted. The dCas9 system has a transacting RNA sequence which could disrupt upstream genes if it was not turned off correctly.
Clay and Sam began work for Clay's Honors Thesis in Biological Engineering on the "Codon Optimization" project. Clay and Sam began preliminary research and worked on constructing a program to optimize GFPs.
Week 2
Monday, May 26 - Sunday, June 1
Ashlee and Emily saw no success with adding the terminator and must move on to a new approach. With the advice of Dr. Salis and graduate student Iman Farasat, they decided to insert the HMF pathway and the dCas9 system into the genome using homologous recombination and the Lambda Red Recombinase system.
Clay and Sam successfully design a program in Excel to optimize genes, continue working on one to be used in MATLAB. Work begins on designing a plan for obtaining useful data to show efficacy of codon optimization, as well as a plan for this cloning in more specific terms.
Week 3
Monday, June 2 - Sunday, June 8
Week 4
Monday, June 9 - Sunday, June 15
Week 5
Monday, June 16 - Sunday, June 22
Week 6
Monday, June 23 - Sunday, June 29
Week 7
Monday, June 30 - Sunday, July 6
Week 8
Monday, July 7 - Sunday, July 13
Week 9
Monday, July 14 - Sunday, July 20
Week 10
Monday, July 21 - Sunday, July 27
Week 11
Monday, July 28 - Sunday, August 3
Week 12
Monday, August 4 - Sunday, August 10
Week 13
Monday, August 11 - Sunday, August 17
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