Team:Colombia Uniandes/NickoJournal

Dear Journal! :)

Here we will place all the information about the work we have been doing during this time, it will be named by date. We hope you enjoy our work and thoughts as much as we do!

Our Notebook

18-Jun-2013

Hello! Hello! Hola! Hola! After we went over the project, we proceed to design our primers so we could place our order, taking into account that we are going to use Fusion PCR as our main protocol. Our primers take around 2 weeks to arrive… sooo meanwhilee all the team started making our E.coli babies electrocompetent, so we can work with them later on.

25-Jun-2013

So today we took our bacterial cells (Top 10) onto an LB medium (no antibiotics). We let it ON at 37 °C on the shaker. Also we prepared all the material we need for tomorrow: ddwater, 10 % glycerol, LB medium and microfuge tubes.

26-Jun-2013

Today we are going to start preparing our cells, we inoculated in the morning and placed all our material that needs to be cold in the fridge 4 °C(ddWater and glycerol), also the centifuge rotor needs to be chilled. Then we just waited for the perfect OD and made our cells around 4:00pm. We made a lot!

We placed them in the -80, ready to start our work!!!

2-Jul-2013

Our primers are FINALLY here and we are anxious to start working!!! So we made our plan(in theory)on big steps for the next weeks!:

1. DNA extraction from E.coli and Cupriavidus metallidurans CH34

2. PCR

 2.1 PrcnR, RBS, rcnR, stop (Amplified as one piece)
 2.2 PrcnA,RBS
 2.3 hoxN, stop

3. Fusion PCR

 3.1 PrcnA/hoxN
 3.2 PrcnR,RBS,rcnR/PrcnA/hoxN

On each PCR add 30 steps more of making gels for confirmation, again and again and again.

3-Jul-2013

Fortunately our team member Silvia Cañas already had a DNA extraction from E.coli so she donated it to us so we could start working! Thank you Silvia! :)

We asked for Cupriavidus metallidurans to our teacher Jenny Dussan at her lab here in the university. She is giving us the strain tomorrow morning! Thank you Jenny!

This done, did the extraction of C.metallidurans and store it in the -30 °C.

4-Jul-2013

Today we started with the 2-step PCR of PrcnR, RBS, rcnR, stop (Fragment that will be called "R" from now on). Results were negative :(

5-Jul-2013

Today we repeated "R" PCR and also did hoxN with the Cupriavidus metallidurans genome. The quantities used for the reaction of hoxN are shown in the table below. Results were negative :( as we could see in our sad, SAD gel.

9-Jul-2013

So, our PCRs are NOT working....We think our problem is the length of the primers and their constitution that could form secondary structures very VERY easily.

That's why we tried a new procotol of PCR for "R" with a temperature gradient, and we tried new buffers for hoxN. Reagents and quantities are shown in the table below.

We got a POSITIVE result on hoxN, and POSITIVE with "R" at "low" temperatures of annealing. Here is our BEAUTIFULLL gel.

GoodNewsGEL

On 5,7,8,9 we can see "R" fragment of 359bp. On 12 we can see hoxN fragment of 837bp.

11-Jul-2013

Today we did the PrcnA PCR and it didn't work out.

15-Jul-2013

We started hoxN PCR with the fusion primers, over the C. metallidurans genome, using 2-step PCR protocol.

Results are negative.

17-Jul-2013

We repeated hoxN PCR with the fusion primers over the genome and PrcnA PCR with E.coli genome.

Nothing worked OUT :( !!!

We are going to try to do the PCR of hoxN with the fusion primers over the fragment already amplified and see, as fas as PrcnA goes...we will try a temperature ramp with a 3-step PCR protocol.

End for today :(

04-Sept-2013

Finally primers arrived! Today we are going to do pRcnA PCR. Besides iGEM kit, we used Phusion High Fidelity PCR kit and tested the its two buffers: Phusion HF reaction Buffer and Phusion GC Reaction Buffer. We used a 2-step PCR protocol. Reagents and quantities of iGEM kit are the same we have been using until now, but reagents and quantities used for Phusion High Fidelity PCR kit are shown in the table below.