Team:UParis BME/Notebook
Lab journal
Brainstorming sessions!
January-February
Literature review, meetings, discussion… Until we all agreed to work on early cancer diagnosis using de-novo-designed riboregulators, toehold switches!
Let’s find teammates and a place to work!
February-March
We are a brand new team in our Faculty. We presented our project to the research teams from the Basic and Biomedical Sciences Faculty from Université de Paris. We met the researcher Pierre Nioche and his team for the first time, they gladly accepted to host our team to conduct experiments. We were initially students from the Biomedical Engineering Paris master degree, Célia and Kévin joined the team to help with the dry lab and wiki!
Time to meet the Lab!
April/June
We wrote the first version of our SwitchMi Designer! Let’s build the toehold switch candidates in the lab... First experiments to build our toehold switches using Splicing for Overlap Extension Polymerase Chain Reaction and first fails that make our strategy evolve!
Our lab becomes our new home
July-August
While we are thinking about molecular cloning protocols to build our toehold switches, we discovered inaccuracies in our SwitchMi Designer. We slept on it to improve the workflow as much as we can! We succeeded in cloning EGFP, the repressor gene for our toehold switches, in our plasmid and received the other part of our toehold switch candidates previously designed. We tried to clone the toehold switch part into our plasmid expressing GFP using classical molecular cloning and golden gate cloning strategies, without success.
Scientific mediation and back to school
September-October
Back to school stopped our experiments in the lab. Most of the team members are now enrolled in their last year before starting a PhD. We focused on giving lectures at highschool and shared our iGEM experience through conferences with Université de Paris and Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie.