IGEM:Imperial/2010/Diary/Week3

This week we continued to research specifics of our project, particularly the signal transduction pathway and the output.

We met with Murray Selkirk, Professor of Biochemical Parasitology at Imperial, on Monday morning. He gave us lots of advice on the elastase that is produced by schistosoma cercariae. We also discussed the sensitivity of the detection system, and the ways in which we could test it. We stayed in contact with Professor Selkirk for the rest of the summer, and he gave us some really helpful guidance with the project, for which we are very grateful.

On Tuesday, we started to drill down on certain aspects of our design which needed further research before we could proceed. Dr Tom Ellis took the Journal Club on Tuesday afternoon.

Thursday was a busy day, involving meetings with Dr Leak (reader in Applied Microbiology) and Professor Filloux (from the Centre for Molecular Microbiology and Infection) who gave us some really useful guidance on various parts of our project, specifically the detection and signaling modules.

We spent the rest of the week researching exactly how our system could work, and at what points it might not work. This was pretty tough, as we had to think realistically and often do away with components that some members of the team had been researching for days.

Piotr baked an apple sponge on Friday!