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Team:Imperial College/Electron microscopy
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Revision as of 20:14, 29 September 2013 by Margarita K (Talk | contribs)
Scanning Electron Microscopy
A way of showing that a degradation enzyme is functional is to incubate it with the polymer in question and scan the surface after some time. This is a widely used method for studying plastic degradation and we have taken advantage of it for characterising Proteinase K ([http://parts.igem.org/Part:BBa_K1149008 BBa_K1149008]) and observed how it "chews" on a PLA cup.
We cut small pieces of the cup and washed them with ethanol and deionised water in order to remove any potential contamination. Next, the substrates were incubated with cell lysate for 1, 2 and 3 days. The negative control was treated with cell lysate from MG1655 E.coli strain containing the empty vector.
