Today, we had a team tutorial session where we learned about where all of our parts come from and how they fit into our project. The name "Bonnie Bassler" acquired a whole new significance (beyond the TED talks that we saw earlier), as we found out that all of our parts came to us in cosmids from her lab. We also discussed the part transformation and how we get from a gene in a cosmid to something that is in biobrick form. This includes steps such as moving the gene from the cosmid to a TOPO vector as a more convenient and stable storage in E. coli bacteria. Gradient PCR with primers with BBk ends will provide us with a biobrick version of this gene. Construction techniques will be used with the promoter and terminator sequences to bring a (hopefully) functional unit into a plasmid. This will be transformed into competent bacteria (E. coli) for later use, and joined with other parts as necessary.
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