Difference between revisions of "Team:Newcastle/Notebook"

Lab Notes

Over the course of the summer we have run numerous experiments, produced a number of different models as well as designing and fabricating our own plug ‘n’ play electronics kit to show off how we think bacteria and electricity might be interfaced in the future.

Whenever we have completed lab work, be it wet or dry, we’ve documented what we did here on our wiki. You can find the all this information on our team’s lab notes pages.

Alongside this documentation we found ourselves using a lot of different protocols repeatedly throughout the summer. Whether these were for processes such as running gel electrophoresis measurements, or for manufacturing our microfluidics chambers, we’ve extracted all of our oft used protocols into a separate library so they are easy to refer to.

Diary

In addition to the write ups of our various experiments which can be found in our lab notes we have also maintained a diary which gives a more general overview of the work we have been doing over the course of the summer. This includes non-lab work such as graphic design and wiki development but also covers activities we have organised, such as our school taster day for synthetic biology.

Safety

Safety has been an important part of our iGEM work from day 1. From picking a project, to picking a chassis and deciding which DNA to synthesise we made sure we considered the potential safety ramifications of our choices. As a foundational advance team 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 both for the biological experiment we performed as well as the electrical and fabrication work we’ve carried out.

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 make sure we kept on track. For each week of our project we have met formally to discuss our progress, set tasks for the coming weeks and ensure that we are meeting the medal requirements.

As well as meeting with our advisors and instructors we have also had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with other researchers across our university, from policy and ethics researchers, to members of the chemistry and electronic engineering department. As well as members of our own university we’ve 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 this year’s InterLab measurement study. We originally completed the InterLab study as part of our laboratory induction course, familiarising ourselves with some of the 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.