Notebook

Aug. 20 – Sep.10 Laboratory establishment: Reagent purchasing

As the first time attending iGEM as a high school team, our lab is not able to do all the experiments involved in DNA level. We bought antibiotics, extraction kits, enzymes, and even markers. At that time, we all have full hopes that our lab is the place we will have a result.

fig.1-3 Doing experiments at the Science building of Beijing National Day School

Sep. 10 – Sep. 31 Groping the whole picture of the experiment: also the taste of failure

During the first couple weeks of experiment, we are in a very relaxed mood while the new semester has just started. We went through the whole process from culturing plasmids till ligation result transformation. However, we failed at the last step. Because we didn’t do any controls and groups, we know nothing about the reason why we failed.

Due to the reason that this is the first time of failure, we are not paying enough attention.

fig.4-6 Photos taken in September

Oct. 1 – Oct. 7 the season of losing hope

October the first is the National Holiday of our country (also the birthday of our school). In these seven days, we repeat the experiment for twice without GPA and assignment pressure.

The result was still failure. After talking with team UCAS, we discovered our deficiency of control experiments and redesigned almost all of the experiments.

fig.7 Receiving the kit

Oct. 10- Oct. 14 No hope at all

In this week, we has repeated those experiments again and failed. It seems our digestion enzymes and T4 Ligase are not working anymore.

Oct. 15 – Oct. 19 Persistence equals to success!!!

Thanks for team CIEI-BJ who lent us their fancy laboratory to us for a weekend; we finally succeeded in chasing the part submission deadline. Though we pick the wrong primer when sequencing, we finally changed it and our result is correct!

fig.8-9 The beautiful autumn after we finished our experiments and a selfie at 23:00