Team:Newcastle/Diary/Minutes/3108

Date 31stAugust 2016
Time From 15:00
Place CBCB Level 2 Meeting Room
Attendees Emilija (chair), Jake (minutes), Lauren, Ollie, Kristina
Apologies Rupert, Kerry, Josh
Previous Meeting 24thAugust 2016

Meeting Minutes

  1. The minutes from the previous meeting were unanimously approved.

  2. We recapped the upcoming the deadlines.

    1. The interlab data was due on the 2nd September. It was reported that we have completed the InterLab (both plate-reader and flow cytometry) and submitted the required forms. This part of the project is now completed.

    2. Team rosters are due 9th September, need to check that all team information is correct on the iGEM wiki. Please double check your information (especially age) on your account page.

    3. Team banners are due on the 7th of October.

      1. Team banners are hung around the convention center and serve as an advert to encourage people to come and see our talk/poster/etc.

      2. Refer to the specification for last year’s (as the current year's ones aren’t on the wiki yet) banners.

      3. We should keep the banner in line with the wiki theme and general style of our presentation (i.e. fun, serious, etc.). Think of it as advertising you.

      4. Should mainly consist of our logo, tagline and nice image(s). Maybe also include the University and sponsors logo.

  3. We went over the standing items.

    1. With regards to testing the temperature change in the microfluidics chambers, we reported that we were unable to repeat the experiments of last week. Pressure build up from the chlorine gas produced during electrolysis causes fluid to leak from the chamber, breaking the connection. Previously we were able to overcome this by using a lower current to allow the gas to escape faster than it was produced, we believe that this is no longer the case because our chambers have been stressed too much.

      1. We have prepared new chambers which are thicker and have bonded them for longer in the hope that they will be stronger to overcome this issue.

      2. We are also considering 3D printing the chambers in plastic, which is a stronger material.

    2. With regards to the wiki bio-cards pictures were taken in the meeting and these will be produced ASAP. Anyone whose picture wasn’t taken in the meeting will have their pictures taken in the following weeks meeting.

    3. With regards to sponsorship opportunities our experiment crowdfunding drive has ended, and we failed to meet our target of $2500 so we won’t be receiving any of the money raised.

  4. We reported back on the individual sub-teams.

    1. Breadboard

      1. Currently having issues getting in touch with people from OpenLab to get our 3D printed parts. This may be due to the summer holidays. Hopefully once they get back in touch with us it will be quick to assemble the final board.

    2. Component

      1. As discussed above. Also, further to that, we were conducting experiments to see if we could use fluorescent dye to measure the temperature change without using the thermometer which damages the chamber. Unfortunately, we were unable to measure any fluorescence change with temperature using the lab’s plate reader. We’ve temporarily suspended investigating this further.

    3. Alternative Constructs

      1. We have successfully transformed the lightbulb construct and the battery constructs. To transform the remaining devices we need to wait on primers from IDT because they are small.

      2. There are some issues with the transformed bacteria. For the lightbulb construct we have what appears to be constitutive expression of the GFP. This however may be due to the shock from the transformation. Similarly the battery colonies are very small, it may be that the protein they are expressing is harming their growth. Although this should only be constitutive expression, we should try growing them on media with L-arabinose to see if they grow better or worse (they should grow worse if this is the case).

      3. There was some discussion around checking if our construct has been inserted into the plasmid or if the plasmid has just re-circularized.

        1. It was suggested that we can can do a colony PCR or restriction digest to see if our construct is definitely in the plasmid.

          1. This would be done by picking 5 colonies at random, miniprep and do an EcoRI->PstI digest to see if they are the correct size (2 bands, one for the insert and one for the plasmid).

        2. Or we can try PCR re-ligation of just the plasmid to see if it is possible for the plasmid to circularise.

    4. Simulation

      1. Kerry and Rupert apologise for being absent. They wanted to report that they have completed the first level of the simulator and are making good progress on the prototype and hope to be able to show this next week. We have also discussed how we are integrating Edinburgh’s DNA storage scheme into the game and are skyping them tomorrow (Thursday 1st) to confirm the final few details.

    5. Wiki

      1. Not much has changed on the wiki, still adding content. Also filming B-roll footage to go in various places on the wiki.

      2. It was noted that we still need to add BMG Labtech and the Flow Cytometry core facility staff as attribution on the wiki.

    6. Battery, Bulb

      1. As discussed in alternative constructs section.

    7. Admin, InterLab, Outreach

      1. As discussed in the standing items section.

  5. We reflected on our progress with respect to the medal requirements.

    1. For the bronze medal requirements all that is missing is attending the Jamboree and adding the characterization information to the parts registry.

      1. It was noted that we haven’t linked our improvements to the respective parts pages. E.g. for the battery parts we have not documented our improvements on the page for those parts. We need to go through and check which parts we’ve used/modified and document this on the respective changes making sure to cross-reference with the new parts.

    2. For the silver medal requirements we need to show that our parts work as expected, we get to define what is ‘expected’. For instance, we may feel that for our variable resistor part it suffices for the bacteria to be able to grow in the presence of zinc rather than for them to actually alter the resistance.

      1. On this note a good experiment for the gold criteria of improving the characterization data on the parts registry would be to show that the metallothionein also sequesters zinc as well as cadmium (and other heavy metals). We can use the experiment that the previous team did for cadmium (need to identify which team this was). This data will then need to be added to the pages for the SmtA part.

        1. Similarly we need to add the improvement to the htpG sequence to the registry and reference this on the existing sequence page.

    3. Our collaboration with Edinburgh is strong and we don’t need to seek any more collaboration opportunities. More about the quality than quantity of the collaboration. We still need to get the protocol off of Edinburgh for what they want us to do with their DNA.

      1. Also judges will want to see how our project was influenced by theirs and vice versa so we need to make this clear in the write up.

    4. For improving the functional characterization of the battery we need to reference that the idea was suggested by the previous iGEM team and that we have adapted it to improve it. Again this needs to go on the appropriate parts page.

    5. Human practices, especially at Gold standard is hard we need to be thinking about how the human practices informed our design practices.

      1. On that note we have a meeting with PEALS on 7th September at 10:00 am.

    6. For the gold requirements we should gear our write up toward the proof of concept rather than the demonstration - i.e. its working individually rather than all together (requirement 3 vs 4) as these are very similar and the first will be easier to reach. Remember that we need only to reach 2 requirements for hold.