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Meetings May
From 2009.igem.org
1st may 2009
Recruiting more group leaders and post docs as instructors. we made a list of people we are gonna talk to. please feel free to suggest any names you can think of.
Arranging funds.. companies we can talk to.. sponsorship details etc..
also made a list of people from MPI that we must speak to.
Getting lab space.. and some consumables to start the work.
Getting our own home page.
Also we decided to have a iGEM meeting every week.. and an unanimous desicion was made to have it on tuesday at 17:15 every week. everyone related to iGEM is expected to attend. And we will circulate a mail regarding what will be discussed in the meeting a few days/1 day in advance.
12th may
so today tomek, priyanka and i, we met up with Michael Alvers from Transinsight. he might make a small contribution of which he will inform us on friday... also he offered to be a business advisor.he will advice us on approaching companies, which is what we need at the moment.
also he offered to provide us with a new software they are marketing.. called kalaimo.. its like a improvised version of imaris.. so if v do any particle tracking.. it will be very useful.
also he said he will spread the word.. about our igem team.. n talk to people he knows or thinks might be interested.
19th may
Today we divided the team into 3 groups, and assigned jobs to each group. these are the things that need to be done.. apart from the labwork..
it was decided that parallel work will improve efficiency
Group 1: Reading Deepika, stanley, arnab
until next week this group will work on a presentation content which will be used for funding etc, and also improvise on the current presentation.
Group 2: wiki Priyanka, Anja
until next week this group will brain storm and come up with concepts and ideas for the wiki page, also look at previous years wiki entries.
Group 3: funding
Tomek, Daniel, Divya.
until next week we intend to get appointments and speak to 5 companies at least, and also some people at the MPI.
experimental work: anja and deepika have already started their part. the biobricks kit has arrived. so v have to get the lab space to keep our stuff.
Also there is a new advisor v have.. ilaria (phd student from schwille lab) Missing 26th may ???/
2nd june
The meeting today had a very low turnout
funding: we sent mails to all the companies whom we had contacted in leipzig.. haven’t got a reply from any.. so we intend to wait this week.. and make calls by monday.. also the ones that are in Biotec we will go to them personally on thursday.. stanley and I will be going to some of them.. it would be great if 1 or 2 more join.. we were working on the proposal with Ilaria during the meeting.. and it will be ready tomo..
we couldnt discuss about the other aspects.. because everyone was not present.
9th june ???? missing
16th june ???? missing
23rd june
Ilaria and Kaj had some useful tips from the workshop, and the most important message was..USE THE PARTS FROM REGISTRY.
In the last meeting it was decided, we have to either come up with a new project using the biobricks or modify the current one to incorporate the biobricks.
S, the first task would be to read up on previous projects and look how they have used the parts from the registry. let us each read at least 3 previous projects and discuss them next week.. i have made a list(attached) of the prize winning ones and assigned 3 of them to each member from our team, emphasis should be on how the biobricks were used.. (If the advisors want to do it as well.. choose any projects u wish.. except the ones in the list)
Also please send your photos to priyanka for updating on the wiki. We should also have a group photo sometime next week (when Prof Schwille has time) for wiki
We got a reply from Eppendorf for sponsorship :). their representative is on a tour.. and will be in dresden in the 1st week of june.. and he wants to meet us.. he will inform us about the date and time later.
QIAGEN is willing to give us some kits.. so once we have designed our experiments.. we can contact them in this regard.
Priyanka/Tomek were supposed to contact someone regarding the silver binding sequence..
30th June Today we discussed about the possibilities of altering our project.
Prof Schwille suggested that we use lipid droplets instead of GUVs, also Ilaria spoke to senthil and got some info from him about microdroplets, we could discuss this futher.
Prof Stewart was at the meeting for a while, and he discussed possibilities of using site specific recombinases, so he suggested 2 options which are interesting but can’t be done in vitro, so can’t be combined with the droplets. so we have to change our project completely.. But he also said that we could do them in 4-6 weeks, taking into account our inexpertise we could still say.. 8-10 weeks.. Which is reasonable..
we can talk about these projects and also about improvising these projects in our next meeting..
The 3 important points to focus on are 1. making a new part 2. making it compatible with the biobribks. 3. characterize it well.
7th 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 surfacts or lipis, 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 microfluidics' circuits. they have both 50 nm channels, thus we should use this type of droplet dimension. one of the circuits have two separate acqueous 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?!?
14th july 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, fundraising, 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.
Again, do you want me to write him back or any of you wants to take care of it?
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.
21nd july
since the turn out for the meeting on tue was very low (only 3) we kept it short.. and couldnt discuss much..
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 meetin.. 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 meetin..
28th july missing ????/
4th aug missing ????
11th aug missing ???
18th aug missing ???/
25th aug missing ???
1st sep missing ??
8th sep missing ???
