Measurement: Newcastle
This year we have been working alongside iGEM teams from across the globe.
We have been working closely with teams from Newcastle, Glasgow and Purdue to help each other improve our projects
from both in and outside the lab.
Part of the Newcastle iGEM team’s project this year
involved an experiment centred around the creation of biological electronic
components. Newcastle asked our team if we could help them out by finding the
thermal conductivity of different growth media. With the help of our biophysicist
supervisor Ryan Edgington, we came up with a plan to measure the conductivity.
Using the apparatus we had available, we discovered that the thermal conductivity of LB and M9 broth to be roughly
the same as water. The conductivity of water at room temperature is about 598.4 $\frac{mW}{Km}\text{ }$(mili
watt per metre kelvin).We found the conductivity of LB and M9 to be (605 $\pm$ 20) $\frac{mW}{Km}\text{ }$ and (570 $\pm$ 30) $\frac{mW}{Km}\text{ }$ respectively
You can read more about our method here.
Software:Purdue
Our team helped Purdue with this by logging data for the 260
iGEM teams of 2015 and critiquing ease of use and effectiveness of the database. For each team
we documented a summary of what their project was about, their track, number of team members, chassis,
research benchmarks, finished parts, the presence or absence of kill switches, medals and any awards
and nominations. We tagged the teams summaries with keywords to make finding a project much easier.
We gave Purdue feedback on the design, layout and how
easy this database was to use to help them improve on what they had done so far.
