Team:Baskent Meds/Notebook

01.01.13-07.01.13:

Happy new year!

September 2012:

School has started. Our trips to lab are a little less than summer time but we’re still trying to go more than once in a week. We were going with whole team last year but for working more effective we’re going with just two people each time. We are really jealous some very crowded teams. It’s just so much experiment for seven people.  And we all needed to learn to do experiments properly, in our team everybody is responsible for everything! I really hope that we can get what we deserve in competition, we’re working really hard for a great idea!

October 2012:

New year is coming soon and we’re just working hard for med school and continue to go our lab every week two or three times. With our new experiment procedures, our experiments are much more successful than the last year but we’re still not very close to finish line. The “We have to finish it this year. We already spent whole last year.” Stress is walking around in our lab corridors.

December 2012:

This year is almost finished, so is our project! We have still so much to do, we didn’t really work for social part of project. I mean videos, documents for wiki, t-shirt designing, so we decided to begin that little by little. We have so many months to do everything perfectly anyway. A little relief. I guess it’s about the new year comin’.

January 2013:

Happy new year! It was a busy week with lots of experiments. We wanted to make a big start to this year so rest of 2013 could be perfect for iGEM. We are very sad about transformation failures, not exactly sure what we’re doing wrong. There is nothing else to do but trying again and again.

3.1.13

plasmid isolation (P1 18A)

Last two weeks were full of hard exams of med school, so we couldn’t really take care of our lab, didn’t do much about iGEM. But now we are on a semester break. It’s not holiday time for us, just a great opportunity for working harder. We’ll be in our lab till our school starts again, every day. Being with our best friends in lab for create something beautiful; it’s still a great holiday for all of us.  We cleaned our lab, restored our cabinets, make enough ladder, SOC, LB…to use. We make lots of ligations and restrictions. Transformations went pretty well, so as plasmid isolations.

23.01.13 ligation+plasmid isolation

February 2013:

School has started again. 3th grade is the hardest in med school. After 7 hours of lesson we come to our 1 hour away lab in Kazan/Ankara and work for hours. Exhausting but being successful at experiments makes us forget everything. If we would win after two years of hard work, we would be happier than ever.

March 2013:

Hello spring. It’s stil very cold in Ankara but warmer weather and little pink flowers and no exam for a while make everything look brighter. Still a few transformations failed but most of our work come to a great ending. We are doing it! By the end of this semester, we’ll have little legionella killer monster e. Coli babies in our hands. Our lab book is really really lovely. We are working so hard for it. We made competent cells, lots of 10x TBE, spreading… Isolations and transformations are daily routine for us, so there is no need to write that down to our diary anymore. 

April 2013:

This two weeks were extremely busy. We were in lab for ten days in a row, worked at least 6 hours everytime, spent 2 hours on the road to our lab. There is literally no time for sleep when we include school time and working for exams. We made a “What do we got in our hands?” list and see what we need to order.

You don’t quite realize how hard you’ve been working until you finish your weekly job and take a look at what you’ve done. This week were full of restrictions, spreading, electrophoresis gel preperation, plasmid isolation, gel isolation, PCR, preparing Amp and LB, TBE, kit transformations (none of them was a success sadly, we don’t know what is wrong with our kit??), ligation and fast ligation( which has failed…)

May 2013:

May is our last chance to work as much as we can and improve our project to finish line before summer holiday. In June we’ll have our last exams and on 4th of July we’ll have the big and scary final exam. If we couldn’t pass that, we’re gonna have to study the same year all over again. So, until our last day in lab before exams we worked harder than ever. We’re getting a bit emotional after seeing how far we’ve come since our first day in lab. Our busiest month so far; transformations, pl. İsolations, lots of PCR… We also worked in our hospital’s Medical Genetic Department Lab. We’re trying to get “Warnericin RK” with using PCR in there. Hope we can do it! In June, we had to leave our work to our advisors, sadly. June went by with lots of RE, lig., cut, copy, paste and i think we’re getting closer to finish line every day!

July 2013:

We’re back to our lab and we will finish it with team spirit! Let’s go to the lab, today! We also started to use our Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts actively. We’re shooing videos, brainstorming for human practice ideas. We’re in touch with other teams from Turkey. Our wiki page is in progress, and we already started to dream about our trip to Lyon/France, to Jamboree. It’s great to work with all your best friends, as always; and in the end of all this hard work, sleepless nights and worries, we’ll finally participate in iGEM Europe Jamboree all together, with a wonderful Project.

5th of July to 28th of July, we were in lab everyday, making experiments. We have 3 plasmid cassettes to prepare. One of them is finished, one of them just waiting for “warnericin rk”; so it2s almost ready, too. Two months before Jamboree, we’re trying to create our Biobricks, we wanna go there with a perfectly done Project. We really wouldn’t wanna go with something that doesn’t work properly. We always kept a great notebook in our lab and carefully write everything we’ve done, as we keep working, our lab notebook become prettier everyday. 

August 2013:

We began with a little break, “The Ramadan Fest” We spent our little 4 day break with our family and relatives and relaxed for a while. We get back to work quickly in 12th of August!  Summer began really great! As always we were working hard for med school while we were trying to figure out how we can manage to finish the project on time. With all good and bad grades, exams finally over in beginning of July, it’s good, we can finally focus on our wet lab studies.

We discussed about it and it seems like our project won’t be entirely finished by the end of summer, none of us would want to go to competition with an unfinished Project, we really want that our project end up perfectly, we didn’t spent our entire year for a presentation of an half-finished project. So we decided to participate in iGEM Competition the next year. It’s kinda disappointment for all of us, to be honest, we were expecting things would be much more easier but genetic experiments really just needs so much luck. We failed at important transformations so many times; it became impossible to finish our job in one year. It’s a disadvantage that our lab and our school are just far away from each other, it really slowed us down. But hey, we are back in lab and we have whole another year in front of us. We are gonna use it wisely and we’ll have baby legionella eater monster e. Colis in our hands when the year is over.

It’s been a long summer vacation. We spent our two months with full of experiments, didn’t spent a single second for nothing. We are relaxed, cause we don’t try to catch up this year’s application time and just trying to do science here! Good, lovely science.

How far we’ve come! We finished very important parts by using our iGEM kit wisely, literally not stopping for a single day really helped us. It’s so easy to work when you dedicated yourself for a great finish. A little advice, this projects, creating a new type of living bacteria that doesn’t exist anymore, if you’re not sure you’re gonna love what you’re gonna create and really wanna maket he world more beautiful and colorful, it’s really a hard thing to handle. Start wisely. We are so lucky that we adore our project this much.

Rest of August went by with experiments everyday. 25 days for our school to start, much before every other faculty, and we have to be quick about finishing it all! 18th of September is the last day for sending projects, guys, can you believe it? It’s almost finished. By almost, i mean really. Nothing left to do. *tears*

September 2013

School is so rough!

Everything is almost finished. Just a little closed to finish line. Parts are ready. We turned the last corner. We need to get every part together and they need to work properly. Sounds like the easy part cause we worked to create the biobricks we’re gonna stick together for two years. But this is really serious. We want to see everything is working properly before we left for Lyon.

T-shirts are finished and their design is so beautiful. We shoot two perfect videos for our team, BaskentMeds. One of them is about our project, a postmodern horror movie, in other video we walked all around Ankara, our lovely city, talk people about iGEM and our team and they cheered for us! There are cheerleaders for our team in every part of Ankara. Everyone participate in video is really liked it, we hope you will, too. We’ve got our plane tickets for Jamboree in Lyon. We are trying to find a cheap, not very bad hostel at the moment. As i said before, project is so close the finish line. After 18th of the month it’s all about preparing a beautiful presantation and a poster. We’re glad this adventureous road is coming to an end, we really hope it will be beautiful and we will leave with an award.