Meetings July

Today we spoke with Senthil Arumugam, a PhD student of the Schwille lab who is working on microfluidics. We talked about the feasibility to use microdroplets for the iGEM project and he was really confident that we could easily achieve our goal using microdroplets. In other words, if we are able to make our genetic circuit work in a cell-free transcription-translation system, then there would be no problem at all in putting everything in a microdroplet. Moreover he offered us his support in teaching to interested students how to produce and handle microdroplets. He told me that the training will take a couple of days and you will be quite confident in using this system in no more than a week.

other technical informations:

- Definition: microdroplets are small water droplets, separated from each other by a continuous oil phase, within a microfluidic channel. Surfactants can be used to stabilize the microdroplets and avoid their fusion. - The microdroplets' stability depends on the use of surfactants or lipids, anyways they last some hours. - The dimension range of the droplets vary according to the mix speed; usually 10-50 um. - in the Schwille lab there are two different mask to create microfluidic's circuits. they have both 50 nm channels, thus we should use this type of droplet dimension. one of the circuits have two separate aqueous reservoirs, this is interesting because we can keep separate two different solutions up to the droplet formation. i.e. separate the cell-free system from the genetic circuits?!? Other things discussed were: 1) The iGEM HQs want just an informal email reply for the July check-in telling them how our team is doing. how things are progressing with your team and project and what you're currently working on: brainstorming, lab work, wiki stuff, fund raising, etc. Ilaria took responsibility of this.

2) Bioethics. As everyone knows we receive a request from the TU-Delft team, and more generally we need to start to think about this issue.

3) The Schwille lab has only the LacZ-alpha fragment with a MCS right in the middle. Anyway in the Registry there is the whole LacZ [BBa_I732005] as well as the alpha-fragment [BBa_E0033], both are in Spring 2009 Distribution.

well.. Divya talked to the system administrator about the home page.. he said it can be done.. we have to send him the contents also for the home page.. we will need a igem team group photo.. this has to be done by next week.. so could everyone plz attend the next meeting.. at least for the photo.. if someone can’t make it.. please propose another day/time..

ilaria is goin to order the peptide..

we have to discuss about the changes to the project and write a summary.. this can be done in the next meeting..