Team:Newcastle/Notebook

Lab Notes

Over the course of the summer, we have performed numerous experiments, generated different types of models, and fabricated our own plug ‘n’ play electronics kit. All with the aim of demonstrating how we think bacteria and electricity could be interfaced in the future. Whenever we have completed lab work, be it wet or dry, we’ve documented each and every stage here on our wiki.

Alongside this documentation, we found ourselves using a lot of protocols repeatedly throughout the summer. Whether these were for processes such as running gel electrophoresis measurements or for manufacturing our microfluidics chambers. To empower the next generation of Synthetic Biologists, we collated all of our protocols and made them available via our library.

Safety

Safety has been an important part of our iGEM work from the very first day. Whether it was deciding upon a project idea, picking a chassis or choosing which DNA to synthesise, we made sure we considered the potential safety ramifications of our choices. As a team in the Foundational Advance track, it is important that we think not just about the safety aspects of the work we’ve carried out, but also the safety aspects of our technology if implemented in a way that it could be completed and made into an easy to use tool for others.

As well as considering the general safety of our project, we carefully considered on a day-to-day basis the safety of the experiments we were undertaking. We were responsible for ensuring that we correctly assessed the risks before we used certain chemicals in our experiments, and made use of the appropriate safety equipment in our lab. We did this for all of the biological, electrical, and fabrication experimental work we performed.

You can find out about our safety considerations and more on our safety page.

Meetings

Every iGEM project involves a significant amount of work, so it was important for us to find a way to ensure we kept on track. During each week of our project, we formally met with our advisors and supervisors to discuss our progress, set tasks for the coming weeks, and make sure that we were meeting the medal requirements.

As well as meeting with our advisors and supervisors we have also had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with other researchers across our university. These ranged from policy and ethics researchers to members of the Schools of Chemistry, and Electrical and Electronic Engineering. In addition to researchers at our own university, we had the good fortune to talk to those further afield, including the other iGEM teams with which we have collaborated.

You can find the agendas, minutes and action items for each formal meeting on our team’s meetings page.

Interlab

We are proud to have participated in the Third International InterLaboratory Measurement Study in synthetic biology. We originally completed the InterLab study as part of our laboratory induction course, familiarising ourselves with some of the common techniques and tools we would be using throughout the summer. Particularly the transformation and growth of E. coli

However, over the course of the summer, as we gained more confidence in our wet lab work we repeated the InterLab two further times to improve the quality of the data we collected. We even expanded on our original goal of completing the plate reader measurements and chose to conduct the plate reader protocol as well!

We have written up our protocols and linked to our completed data submissions over on our InterLab study page.