Team:Baskent Meds/Notebook

01.01.13-07.01.13:

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)

21.01.13-01.02.13:

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

04.02.13-28.02.13:

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.

3.3.13-24.3.13:

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. 

2.4.13-15.4.13:

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.

16.4.13-29.4.13:

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…)

1.5.13-30.5.13:

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

: 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

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! 