Valencia/Adversities

From 2007.igem.org

Latest revision as of 16:24, 26 October 2007

Here it is, here it is not (part II)

if you think that an [http://www.igem.upv.es/igem06/index.php?title=Adversities improbable fact] is way improbable to happen twice... read this...

we couldn't believe our eyes when the fluorescence from the ethidium bromide just disappeared in front of us...

those weird things that happen from time to time, that are in open confrontation to the commen sense, are an issue for the functional, positivist kind of science that is made nowadays in the lab -arnau

Waiting for Mr. Cell

the commercial cells were meant to arrive on the first of august, but they arrived on day 8. we tried to tranform home made DH5a and XL1-blue with no colonies at the end of the day...

but everything looks better since we use the commercial ones...

A strange visitor

august 15 was a national holiday in Spain, so everything was closed. even kindergarden. so we had a visit from a three-year-old child that could not be still for five minutes.

we had to take all our patience out to do our minipreps and purifications with a half-meter tall child asking 'why' every while...

No bacteria, again

waiting for the commercial cells for a whole week, we tried to work with home-made chemically competent DH5-α... the efficiency was lower than zero, if that could be possible...

this happened to do that the work was stopped for a whole week...

Kanamicine resistant, only?

in order to do the backbone shift, we had to transform some kanamicine resistant (ONLY) plasmid. we did not worry about the Biobrick, as we were to excise it to use it with our constructions...

well, we have tried some Biobricks up to now, and we have witnessed two things: they grew in ampicillin AND kanamicine (and they were marked as only kanamicine on the registry) or they did not grow AT ALL...

the plasmid 23F from plate 2 grows on kanamicine AND ampicillin!

the plasmid at 2A from plate 2 does not grows at all on kanamicine or ampicillin plates...

Ligations and transformations

we all know that these processes are the protocols that have to be implemented better... but, still, when one goes on adjusting parameters and changing parts of the protocols without any reliable clear improvement of the technique, you end feeling a little bit stupid...

Simbiology

We request the mathlab packages at the end of September, but we didn't receive anything.

We don't know if this is also happening to other teams or...

Courses and schedules

Regular courses start in Spain at the end of September. Students know that they have to attend lectures and go to the classroom in order to get a nice grade at the end of the year...

this causes that by the middle of September, the lab was quite empty. It is something one has on mind and tries to deal with it, but it still is an adversity that has to be overcame. You select better what experiment your are going to make and try to make realistic schedule (even though we have not gone home earlier than 8pm since we entered the lab)