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From 2013.igem.org

Week 5

Monday

As a team, we discussed how we were going to design the G-Blocks. We decided that we're going to put one gene after another, with restriction sites between them. We talked about how to design the primers to add the prefix and suffix, and we also changed our DNA sequence to remove the four restriction sites that are used in the prefix and the suffix by changing certain base pairs.

Tuesday

We focused on putting the sequence together and creating the primers. The sequence was finalized and submitted to our instructor for review. We hope we can order very soon, so we can get into the lab as soon as possible. Also, we designed primers to add the prefix and the suffix to our genes. These primers will be further explored using software to make sure they will work for our purposes. We also began to explore the kinetics of the Mevalonate Pathway so we can model our design.

Wednesday

We further explored the kinetics of the Mevalonate Pathway and are almost ready to model it! There are just a few odds and ends of information that we need, but since we discovered the great resource, BRENDA, we are confident that we can find what we need. BRENDA is a comprehensive enzyme information system, and it gave us everything we needed to know, and even more. We hope to learn more about SimBiology to model our kinetics in the next week.

Thursday

Happy Fourth of July!

Friday

Two of the final four primers were designed to pull the genes that we need out of the BL21 strain of E.coli. The gene for the next two primers is proving tough to find, but we hope that with further research we can find the sequence and design the last two primers. Our goal is to have all the primers designed by Monday so we can order the parts we need.