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Notebook
January 2020
Week 1
4th: We had our first full team meeting!
Week 2
6th - 15th: Brainstormed about various project ideas with our PI and decided to work on post-harvest losses in sugarcane.
15th: We attended the BITSAA Global Meet that provided us with the opportunity to interact with alumni from our university, pitch our project idea and gain valuable feedback.
18th: We met with Mr Sunil Kumar Ohri from the Sugar Federation in UP.
Week 3
We conducted our initial growth curve experiments in sugarcane media. We looked at multiple dilutions and clarification methods.
Week 4
We brainstormed about the growth curve model and completed the experiments.
February 2020
Week 1
2nd: We had our first meeting with Varsha Jaisimha (iGEM Ambassador to Asia Pacific). Since we are a first time team, she was instrumental in guiding us on how to get started.
Our team conducted extensive research and literature review. We also began our sponsorship drives and our crowd funding initiatives.
Week 2
We met our PI to work out finer details about our project and thought about how to incorporate Varsha's initial feedback.
Week 3
We began our initial PCR of invertase of Arabidopsis thalliana.
Week 4
We were on a break this week due to our midterms.
March 2020
Week 1
MIDTERM WEEK!
Week 2
13th: We began our experiments for capillary action in sugarcane.
14th: Instruction at university was suspended in lieu of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Week 3
No work could be done as everyone was still adjusting to the new normal.
Week 4
We had our first virtual team meeting! This meeting was crucial for us to redefine our approach. We formulated a weekly schedule for our team meetings.
We restructured our team into subgroups and decided to meet twice a week for working sessions.
April 2020
Week 1
1st - 7th: We had the meetings for the sequences and modelling teams.
Week 2
We had follow up meetings with Varsha to discuss how to go about our project virtually.
Week 3
We started designing the Atmosphere Regulated Killswitch (BBa_K3512042). We began formulating the design of the model for the killswitch.
Week 4
Conducted literature review for the pFruB-Cra module and the kill switch to determine a few parameters.
May 2020
Week 1
We conducted docking studies of anti-invertase and invertase.
We also modified our approach in the in silico modelling of our pFruB-Cra system and kill switch.
Our wet lab team began the construction of the pFruB-Cra sequences.
We searched for contacts of farmers to augment our human practices approach.
Week 2
We continued working on tasks from the previous week and set up meetings with farmers in Gulbarga and Mandya.
Week 3
We met the farmers from Gulbarga and Mandya.
Week 4
We thought about how we could implement their suggestions in our design.
June 2020
Week 1
We created the initial model of our kill switch and growth curve. We also sent our biobrick sequences to our PI for verification.
We met the Chief Chemist from the Kichha Sugar Company.
Week 2
13th: We began our collaboration with Abhigyaan — a student run organization at BITS Goa.
19th: We met the iGEM OSU team regarding biocontainment and kill switch modelling.
Week 3
23rd: We had our first meeting with the University of Rochester and IITM and the Accessibility Initiative was started!
We made an initial prototype for WikiSync.
Week 4
30th: We met a farmer from the Tamil Nadu belt.
Set up Travis for CI/CD for development of WikiSync.
July 2020
Week 1
4th: We met with the iGEM Groningen Team and learnt more about their project.
We started formulating a plan for the modelling of the biosensor.
We also had a meeting with our secondary PI to discuss various experimental designs that can be implemented.
Reorganized WikiSync codebase to split into modules for easier debugging.
We started working on our wiki and the Wiki Starter Pack.
Week 2
14th: We met with Andre Hermann regarding the sugar industry in Brazil and guidance on policy making. We also released our project logo!
15th: We started our Humans of iGEM initiative.
We incorporated feedback from iGEM Groningen into our kill switch model.
We wrote file classes, a basic HTML parser and started building the upload map functionality for WikiSync.
We added automatic citations functionality to the Wiki Starter Pack.
Week 3
22nd: We met with Dr Bejoy Thomas about our economic modelling.
25th: We hosted the first ever BioSummit!
Added a CSS parser to WikiSync.
Start writing tests for WikiSync.
Added some more features to Starter Pack.
Week 4
31st: The Indian teams got together for the first All India iGEM Meet!
Start writing documentation for WikiSync and Starter Pack along with more tests.
August 2020
Week 1
We continued consulting with iGEM Groningen on our killswitch model and and began rethinking our approach. We also completed our biosensor model.
The required experimental protocols were finalised.
More tests and documentation for WikiSync.
Prepared Starter Pack for release during the Global Meetup.
Week 2
Our college reopened for the fall semester.
We practiced with iGEM Rochester for our Global Meetup sessions and recorded them.
Week 3
19th - 22nd: Our team hosted sessions during the Global Meetup.
We wrote usage guides for WikiSync along with some more features.
Week 4
30th: We had our first meeting with Synbio for Everyone where we discussed about our Accessibility initiative.
We restructured our economic model based on the feedback recieved during our AIIM presentation.
September 2020
Week 1
We completed our model for the inoculant as well as auxotroph design.
We began designing the process flow diagram and industrial application of our product.
9th: We finalised our wiki illustrations and design!
Week 2
We began brainstorming on ideas for our promotional video and reached out to the Mime Club on campus.
We wrapped-up the Language project.
Week 3
This week was spent finalising our safety forms after feedback from PI.
We also submitted our biosafety proposal to the Biosafety Committee on campus.
Week 4
MIDTERM WEEK!
October 2020
Week 1
We started writing first drafts for the content on our wiki and worked on its design.
Week 2
We completed animations for our homepage and added all the pages as per the Judging Form.
Week 3
We geared up for the wiki freeze and started working on the presentation video.
