IGEM:PennState/2007/News/MeetingNotes

Monday, May 21-Group Meeting in 244 Ag Engineering 3PM More information about the meetings below. If times do not work, please let me know and we can reschedule them to a better time. Also, if anyone has a copy of the Genetic Switch and would like to lend it out to one of our 3 new members please let me know, and I will get it to one of them as quickly as possible.

At the Student Meeting Friday, May 18-Student Meeting at 408 Althouse 2PM We went over:
 * using the spectrophotometer
 * locations of lab supplies
 * general lab strategies
 * planned brainstorming session

Monday, May 21-Group Meeting in 244 Ag Engineering 3PM Summer Schedule

Monday, May 30-Group Meeting in 244 Ag Engineering 4PM Todays Topic: Project Propoasals Suggestions: Focus on areas under advisors expertise, focus on iGEM objectives (Energy, Fuel) iGEM objectives for 2007
 * Friday is decision deadline
 * Health and Medicine
 * Energy and Environment
 * Parts and Devices

Project Proposals
 * Radiation Biosensor
 * Heat Biosensor
 * Exothermic Enzymes
 * Biofilms
 * Tom Richards: Applications to Synthetic Biology
 * Renewable Energy Biomass:
 * Problem is Multiple Sugar Types
 * Diauxie
 * Remove Diauxie by modifying bacteria to remove both sugars at the same time.

Saturday, June 2-Undergraduate Online Meeting 4PM Plan:
 * What is the composition of the biomass (sugars x%)?
 * Is there a biomass standard
 * How do we knock the xylose metabolism parts out of the chromosome
 * Put xyl A, B, E under control of xylR
 * Do we we want the xylose metabolism to be under tight repression?
 * Should we be looking at multiple sugar metabolizing pathways?
 * Noah/Garrett-look up biomass papers come up with questions
 * Luc-come up with weekly plan

Sunday, June 3-Undergraduate Meeting HUB 12PM Monday, June 4-Group Meeting in 244 Ag Engineering 4PM
 * Biobrick-ing
 * Just need to order primers, will have biobricks on them
 * Have to add a silent mutation to use restriction enzymes on so that you dont accidentally cut the gene
 * Should probably make 2 separate biobricks:
 * 1) All the way from xylF to just before xylA starts
 * 2) Smaller one: remove crp binding site, possibly put in a spacer to preserve looping mechanism
 * This might be a pain to PCR: might want to order it if we go that route
 * Diauxie Project
 * Use xylE instead of xylF,G,H (smaller and easier to work with)
 * Ptac = mixture of lac and trp
 * If xylR acts like araC we need to keep an upstream area to allow it to loop correctly (~200bp)
 * Fis? - Noone knew how it worked or if its necessary... found short description from 2006 iGEM, also paper describing Fis listed on ANGEL under Diauxie
 * NAD+ Chromosomal deletion- good idea, research further
 * Biomass- Glucose and Xylose are ~80-90%
 * Don't need to worry about repressing crp because majority of dimers will be crp* so the overwhelming concentration will factor out crp
 * Dosimeter Project
 * Currently a UV lysing component is used on plasmids
 * Does it use recA? ...should look into it
 * Part BBa R0011 - Lambda switch
 * Could consider biobrick-ing recA
 * Next Steps:
 * Biobrick xylR first separately, biobrick other components mentioned
 * Look into cloning software (CloneManager), If not possible to get on Richard Lab computers we can use Dr. Cirino's computers in his lab sometime
 * Order DNA synthesis soon
 * Research feasibility of dosimeter
 * Continue researching diauxie project.. Dr. C will send more papers