Project Decisions!

February 2018

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Based on Judge feedback and our desire to bring the 2017 WLC-Milwaukee project to fruition, we decided to continue our 2017 project detecting E. coli in contaminated water supplies using Lambda Phage tail proteins. We began laying out the ways we would improve our past project and complete the areas where it had fallen short and been unsuccessful in 2017.

Began Cloning parts into pTrc99a

March 2018

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With the help of our advisor, we designed primers and began the frustrating process of amplifying and cloning our parts from the pETail4 plasmid (containing the Lambda Phage tail protein genes) into pTrc99a in order to control protein expression levels using the pTrc99a IPTG inducible trc-promoter (also called Ptac).

MUBRC

April 2018

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A number of our team members participated in MUBRC (The Milwaukee Undergraduate Biological Research Conference) by volunteering and helping facilitate setup for this event while Jack presented a poster of our past work and hopeful project improvements in order to gain feedback from other undergraduate researchers and PIs in attendance.

Started Human Practices Investigation

June 2018

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As a team we began investigating issues relating to water quality and testing, how our project may fit into the market, how our project could fulfill a need for water testing in certain areas, and could be designed to reduce waste and eliminate any environmental hazards.

Organization Outreach Day

August 2018

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In August Jack and Laura presented a poster and posterboard at the Organization Outreach day, welcoming new freshman students to our campus and talking with various students about bioengineering, synbio, and our project. Through this event we made contact with a number of students who were very interested in joining iGEM and have already gotten involved with our team!

Confirmed Clones in pTrc99a

September 2018

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We finally obtained our clones in the pTrc99a backbone and confirmed their presence by diagnostic digest and sequencing. This was a major step as we could now clone our parts into pSB1C3 and include the trc-promoter for IPTG induction in our parts.

Science Exploration Day

September 2018

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This event was a great Outreach event and was an awesome way to interact both with almost 20 grade school aged students and their parents from the local community and provide various lab activities and opportunities to these bright young students. The students participated in hands on explorations of some of the numerous areas within STEM.

Protein Purification and Analysis

October 2018

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After obtaining successful clones of our parts into pSB1C3 we were finally able to start protein purification using Nickel column purification methods and analyze our parts for successful protein production.

System Prototyping and Continued Testing

October 2018

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After analyzing substrate-HRP ratios and which methods would suit our test kit system, we began a system prototype, conjugated HRP to our proteins, and performed some testing to optimize system operation both in controlled ideal lab circumstances and in more realistic circumstances to determine the viability of our product.