"

From 2013.igem.org

Week 8

Monday

As a team, we discussed our next plan of action. There is only one protocol left to write, and we decided on a direction for that. We also discussed information received from SAE on campus. They are helping us gather information about using Eucalyptol as a biodiesel or a fuel additive. More research must be completed to learn more about its potential as a biodiesel and its properties. We also created a plan of action for when we finally get our parts. We have four major steps outlined, but we need to further research what it takes to characterize parts. We want to submit characterized parts, but we need to work on protocols for doing so.

Tuesday

In small groups, we added finishing touches to the protocol list. After the last protocol is finished, we hope to create a binder full of our procedures to serve as a lab manual and help keep us all organized. We also emailed Lakefront Brewery about potentially obtaining some of their spent grain waste. Finally, we researched more about using Eucalyptol as either a biodiesel or a fuel additive, and the fuel additive aspect seems the most promising. We hope to keep researching that this week and keep making progress on compiling information about Eucalyptol as a fuel. We also watched the safety certification presentation, which means we are all on our way to becoming safety certified!

Wednesday

We had to redesign a few primers and gene blocks today to conform with the IDT ordering standards. There were two areas repeated within the same gene block, so we had to do more optimization on the different codons of the gene. This was successful, and we hope to order within the next day or two. We also researched more on Eucalyptol as a fuel. We found a few new sources, but there is not much current research on the topic. Instead, we hope to find properties of Eucalyptol, and compare them to the characteristics of existing fuels. The only problem we see with this is not being able to access the different papers we need for information.

Thursday

We worked more on developing our protocols and the details associated with them, creating a "shopping list" of kits and reagents. We hope to finish this project up on Friday, so that our entire lab procedure guide will be condensed and in one place. This will keep us organized and help to determine if there exists any holes in our plan that should be addressed before entering lab. We also had a team meeting with the WLC iGEM team. They delivered a pump and secretion tag system, which we will use to excrete xylosidase and xylanase from the cell membrane of the E. coli and into the spent grain mixture. We discussed collaborating on producing the secretion-pump-tag system as BioBrick(s).

Friday

We worked more on the "protocol binder" and made some progress in adding specifics to each protocol. The protocols are more general at this point to fit all scenarios, but now we need to keep working to make the protocols specific to our project and situations. We also created a template for the binder and have a rough draft we will continue with on Monday.