Team:Leeds/Notebook

• We’ve moved into our office, deep in the basement of the research labs in the Miall building.

Our time has been taken up getting acquainted with our office ( and ourcoffee machine!) and roughing out the fine details of our protocol.

• We’ve pulled together a combination of the teams various projects to create our final idea, we’re now looking at making a detector platform for physically binding substrates to activate a reporter. (Scintillating no?)

Our team has been busy thinking of inventive assay design to characterise our biobricks; frantically trying to code our wiki and taking our team photos (important work)

• Jeni, one of our first year biochemists has been working on her primer design, getting everything ready to start in the labs next week. We’ve been compiling our part list and getting our order ready; a buffer and bacteria shopping spree.

• We’re trying to plan out our outreach programs, so watch this space. We’re going to be doing instructional videos on RC10 and golden brick assembly; as well as some more basic introduction to Synthetic Biology for younger students, alongside running some SynBio workshops for summer students that’ll be here at Leeds.

• Today we've been working on our presentation; getting it ready for the YSB conference by running it past some of our lecturers; scary stuff. We've also been getting comfortable in the lab space, making up stacks of LB broth and preparing for some serious bacterial colonisation.

• It's been a busy week here at Leeds iGem HQ. We've got a Biochemist and a Physicist (a rather handsome pair) frantically working on coding the wiki and creating images for the presentations and posters, it's gonna be beautiful (we hope)

We've had a team of biochemists (all 3 of them) hard at work designing primers and getting ready to steamroll into the lab next week.

• With our primers in the post, we've been mass producing growth media and agar plates. We've resuspended and transformed a selection of the biobricks we plan on using, including YFP, GFP, INP, and some terminators. The wiki team have been locked in the basement and their not allowed out till it looks beautiful.

• Today we've been writing out scripts for our tutorial videos, they'll be a series aimed at younger students with an introduction to synthetic biology, and a series aimed at Synthetic Biologists on things like Goldengate and Gibson assembly. Then we locked our token nanotechnologist into a lab with a couple of thousand pounds worth of microfluidics chips and we're hoping for the best.

• Been a busy day; plasmid preps, glycerol stocks and further transformations of quorum sensing biobricks (pLux and LuxR), promoters and cyan fluorescent proteins. We then had a skype conference Cyrille Pauthenier, the advisor for the Evry iGem team. This rather charming fellow went into great detail on Goldengate and Goldenbrick assembly methods and their pros and cons. We ended our day doing soundtests for our educational videos; watch for the remix.

• Whew, we will want to write a lot

• End of the Week!

• We don't know yet