Team:Exeter/Notebook/July23
Thursday, 23 July
At 10am the parts team had a meeting with Mark and Chloe to get feedback on our initial experiment design and clear up some things we were unsure about (such as how to purify enzymes from the transformed bacteria). Chloe informed us that we cannot transform multiple plasmids into Bacillus subtilis, as each plasmid requires a unique Origin of Replication and B. subtilis only recognises one.
Therefore our options are to transform all genes/parts into one plasmid (although the Urease gene is very big so it's doubtful whether this would work), experiment on E. coli or use a cell-free approach.
We will likely use a cell-free approach to experiment on the enzymes (as it would then be easier to purify them), however this is not the best approach for understanding how well our enzymes function in vivo.
Team Collaborations
At 12:30pm we had a collaboration meeting with UCL. Both teams ran through a presentation on their project. UCL offered to model how much CO2 the Carbonic Anhydrase uses in relation to microbial respiration and we offered to do some lab work for them. They also asked if we could 3D print a prototype of their Microbial Fuel Cell.