Meetings August

In august the primary concern was setting up the lab. Since Biotec and CRTD is already pressed on space.. we had a tough time finding a lab. After speaking to Prof Schwille and Dr Frank Groß we settled on the teaching lab for the iGEM work.

the first week we brought "THE BOARD" :).. got permission to use the spectrophotometer, the freezer, incubators, fridge etc. We also arranged to get the pump for the microfludic chamber. Since the chambers are made in the adjacent lab, its convenient to have the pump and the microscope in the iGEM lab. The GCK software was also installed in the computer in the lab, so we could look at the maps of the constructs.

We ordered the peptide for creating the silver nanocrystals. This is expected to arrive sometime next week. So next week we can start with the first experiments on the silver part. we have made some progress on the making the vesicles. the GUVs have been giving us trouble, and due to their instability and the fact that they do not last too long, we abandoned the approach and decided to try out vesicles in microfluidic chambers. Making the vesicles consistently seems to be a problem, so Senthil suggested that we make use of surfactants. This will be tried next week. Kaj has designed the cloning strategy so soon we will start working on the Recombinase stuff. This week we have been working on making a list of all the biobricks that ill be useful for us and we will work on recovering this.