Team:Newcastle/Meetings/16 March 2009

16/03/2009 - iGEM Meeting

Come up with the project title
Create the frontpage of the wiki
Discuss our project title (combination of the 1st and 3rd idea)
Come up with the paragraph summarising our project idea to be put up on the external wiki

Review the questions and challenges put forward for each idea
Do additional reading/research into ideas but more of an emphasis on the first and third ideas
Finalise an idea and write a paragraph on the idea to be posted in the main wiki
Reschedule wiki tutorial with Morgan.

Start: 5p.m at Claremont Tower Room 601, End: 7p.m
Reviewed previous actions points
- Funding - Done (Jessica)
Briefly discussed about BioBricks
Discussed about the awarding of the medals
- Our project would probably be based on the environmental side
- Some of the "easier" awards which can be more "easily" obtained are: Best Wiki, Best Poster, Best Environmental Project, Best Presentations, etc.
- One of the criteria for the medal is to help a team, helping a new team would probably be easier.
To make our wiki more attractive, a banner using flash, javascript would be desired, referred to iGEM2008 Heidelberg's wiki as a good reference of a nice wiki.
Brainstormed on the paragraph on our idea to be put on the external wiki.
Brainstormed for our title, coming up with keywords such as
- Heavy metals
- Stochastic switch
- Soil/mud
- Tunable
- Sporulation
- Sequester
- Spores
- Thousand years memory
- Scavenge
- Hunter
- Seeker
- Basillus Subtillis
- Kamikaze/Suicde
- The Quest to Sequester
Discussed that, perhaps, with the combination of the two ideas, could just use UV light to shine to "test" the sample, instead of having to take a sample and bringing it back to the lab for testing.
Discussed that antibodies could be used in identifying the spores.
Questions
- How to extract the metals from the cell?
- How can we get metalloproteins into the cells?
- Sporulation is induced due to stress, how much metal can we get into the cell?

Familiarise self with BioBricks, website to go: www.partsregistry.org - ALL
Craig, Matthew, Arun to come up with the presentation slides, with the addition of pictures, flow diagrams, instead of just words to present the idea.
Read Nigel Robinson's paper (11 pages) in preparation for Wednesday's (18/03/09) meeting - ALL
Think of questions to ask regarding Nigel Robinson's paper - ALL

Craig, Matthew and Arun presented our project idea to the team and guest advisor Nigel Robinson
Nigel Robinson posted some questions
- What metals are we interested in?
  - Cadmium, Mercury, Arsenic >> Red List metals
  - Will be difficult to import the red list metals, normally imports Mg, Zn, etc instead and not the red list metals >> Switch the exporter switch for Cd efflux
  - E.Coli has a mercury importer on ...
  - Silver will go in through copper??
  - Importer for Zn in Bacillus, express a protein ...
  - Put Gsh A, Gsh B into ... (from E.Coli)
  - Knock out Cad A, then find the maximum Cad A that survived.