Good Day, World!
Hello everyone! We're thrilled to be hard at work already on our iGEM project, and even more excited to be taking part in the grant challenge with experiment.com!
We're already well into week 8 of our summer so we thought it would be a good idea to publish some of our accomplishments here to keep you all up to date!
May 31st 2016: Our first day together! Today was all about getting to know each other and enthusiastically discussing all of our goals for the summer.
Then, after two long weeks of brainstorming.....
June 10th 2016: Our DNA Typewriter is born! Today we presented our project to our supervisors and following their feedback, (finally) gained their approval! Celebrations all round!
June 14th 2016: First day in the lab!!! We put on our lab coats and gloves and got a tour and thorough safety talk of the lab we would be calling 'home' for the rest of the summer.
June 20th 2016: A little friendly competition never hurt; today we held an intrateam competition to pick our logo! The previous week we decided on a team name - BabblED - and decided that our 'mascot' would be a super cool DNA Typewriter.
And the winner is .....
Well done to team member Pepy Iliev!
June 23rd 2016: And we're published! After being approached by Dr Steven Burgess from PLoS SynBio, we were able to publish a blog post on PLoS! Check it out here.
By this point we had already finished up our text to DNA encoding programme, designed and ordered our BabbleBricks!
June 30th 2016: Successful transformation of the world's first BabbleBricks! We successfully transformed the words 'Good' and 'Day' into E.Coli cells! A good day indeed!
July 3rd 2016: We're on Bulgarian National TV! Thanks to our Bulgarian team member, Pepy, our story is broadcast on national news in Bulgaria!
July 7-9th 2016: An exciting week for the team; we were lucky enough to attend the SynBioBeta and Synthetic Yeast Sc 2.0 Conferences. It was so inspiring to listen to major DNA synthesis companies such as Twist, Gen9 and ThermoFisher talk about how important DNA data storage is. We couldn't agree more!
Right now, we are working on polishing up our assembly method so we can start constructing some DNA messages and storing longer text in our BabbleBricks. We are also working on some exciting collaborations with other teams and planning a Northern UK iGEM Team Meet-up for next week.
Until next time!
