Team:UCLA/Notebook/General Meetings/22 May 2015

iGEM UCLA




Week 8 General Meeting

  1. Committee Updates
    1. Administrative
      • Stuff goes here
    2. External Affairs
      • Start coordinating a SoCal iGEM Meetup
        • Laverne, CalTech, UCSD, SDA Encanitas, TPCC San Diego, CCA San Diego (maybe invite norcal teams too)
    3. Financial
      • Donut fundraiser profits: ~$90ish range
      • David's holding on to the cash
    4. Infomedia
      • T-shirts are here!
      • $9 per student-- cash or venmo to Anuved (check Slack for phone number)
      • SPARK filming next week
    5. Lab Management
      • We have SOP forms prepared and ready to turn in to Seidlits, but she has lately been unavailable
      • Have olivia drop off under Seidlit's door, or have Dino sign it
    6. Social
      • Summer kickoff/Goodbye seniors dinner next Friday after GM


  1. Project Updates/Discussion
    1. Spider Silk Genetics
      • Working on optimizing PCR amplification of MaSp plasmids
      • We tested post-elution primers and VF/R primers for amplification.
      • VF/R seem to work fine, will be doing the ligation test and BsaI digestion using PCR product next week
      • We put the NotI concatemer scheme on hold until we show that PCR amplification works (or doesn’t work)
      • When can we order initiator, terminator, capping oligos.
      • Check out wiki notebook for more
    2. Protein Expression
      • Julian: Finished Finished extraction of protein via lysis of cells with ABD domains, will start affinity chromatography next week to purify
    3. Honeybee Silk
      • Megan: just redid the transformation with the pET24a expression vector, made glycerol stocks today, will be sequencing pet vector. Will be working on cloning the silk coding region in the pET vector.
      • Find out what sequencing primers to use for the pET vector
    4. Materials
      • Tubing for double dialysis concentrating didn't work (how come?)
      • Will re-try with cassettes
    5. Protein Cages
      • Revisited sites and compiled list of insertion sites (check our project notebook)
      • Tyler found a good spot to do a S → C mutation for conjugation (residues 9 and 11)
      • Email Yeates to check out wiki and provide feedback
      • Will begin designing gblocks and primers for site directed mutagenesis on Monday