Team:WLC-Milwaukee/Notebook

Timeline

Click on each month to see what we did!

January

We started brainstorming for our project and began training new iGEMers.

February

We decided on a project, came up with a potential plan of action and began investigating currently available safe water-testing methods.

March

We tested current methods for E. coli detection in water and obtained the pETail4 vector for sub cloning and protein purification. We verified this vector produced the protein of interest with an SDS-PAGE. Presented for Community leaders and Donors to our college before facilitating hands on lab activities with interested individuals.

April

We presented our project for the Milwaukee Area Undergraduate Biological Research Conference. Our team also presented on the importance of clean water and biotechnology at our college’s Biotechnology info night (hosted by our iGEM team). Spoke with Dr. Sanjib Bhattacharyya of the Milwaukee Public Health Department on the practicality of our proposed system, and things we should consider when moving forward with our project.

May

We debated purification of the entire phage tail vs. using a HIS-tag and sub cloning small portions of the tail. Our team game-planned for the summer’s project goals.

June

We prepared for presenting our project at the Asia Pacific iGEM conference and designed primers for sub-cloning portions of the Lambda phage tail.

July

A team member presented at the Asia Pacific iGEM conference and gained valuable advice from other iGEMers while becoming inspired and motivated by other teams’ projects.

August

We began constructing our BioBricks and reunited as a team after a long summer break! We participated in our college’s Organizational Outreach day welcoming freshmen and interacting with other campus organizations.

September

We transformed our constructed plasmids and began purifying our phage tail protein with nickel-column purification. We began collaborations with our new connections from the Asia Pacific iGEM conference.

October

We presented a talk on GMO’s and importance of water quality to our community at the local library. Our team visited a water treatment plant to investigate current methods for water quality testing. Hosted an event for high school students where we discussed genetic modification and iGEM before they toured various lab spaces on campus.

November

We fell extremely behind in all our classes and almost dropped out of college because of all the iGEM things we needed to do, but we survived! After the rush of the Wiki freeze deadline we got to work creating our presentation and building our poster.