User:Petergoldstein
From 2006.igem.org
Brown Undergrad, class of 2008.
Brown PO Box 4209
Click here to view my calendar
Concentration history: I came in as a Math major and changed to Math/Computer Science after a semester. After three days of believing I was a Computer Science concentrator, I decided on computational biology, where I have remained to this day.
I play the viola (as loudly as possible), sing in Gilbert and Sullivan operas, whistle with Lip Service (whistling choir) and am a brother in the Alpha Delta Phi society.
My Part
I was brought onboard as a computer science-type gent so I'm responsible for a number of the more technical/less liquidy portions of the team's work. I run the journal club, keep the chemical database managed, and work with others on modeling the systems we're assembling in the lab. I am also working with Brendan on assembling the parts necessary for the sender cell portion of the freeze tag project.
Weekly Reports
Week One
Arrived and set myself up. Took lab safety and hazardous waste training minicourses. Learned about transformation, running gels, and ethanol precipitation. Made plates with Annie (later turned out to be faulty as we omitted LB broth. Live and learn)
Week Two
More tranformations carried out on better plates than the ones we made. Met James Brown, our iGEM ambassador. The concept of iGEM as a project intending to turn genetic engineering into a well-defined standardized system becomes clear to me.
Week Three
Arranged the journal club, which met in the evening. Hayato's paper is about binding luciferace to the magnetic particles in our magnetotactic bacteria. Attended numerous meetings including a visit from Pfizer's outreach team.
Week Four
I arranged the journal club, at which Azeem presented his paper about the bacterial bull's-eye. The following day I modeled the bacterial bull's-eye in JDesigner as an exercise in the program's use and to get a better handle on how computaitonal analysis can help the project. The remainder of the week I spent transforming the various parts necessary for the sender cell for the freeze tag project. All three parts transformed and we are now growing them up.
Week Five
Came in during the weekend with Brendan to grow up and then miniprep our parts. One of them is suspiciously yellow and it turns out that one was expressing GFP. Pity the part as which we had it labled doesn't have GFP... I ran the journal club this week, discussing the repressilator. I met with Azeem and LK to build a model for the freeze circuit in the receiver cell on Friday.
Week Six
We regrew our parts as the suspicious results of before led us to repeat the process. By the end of the week we'd done our first ligation. This week's journal club was Jason discussing a paper about invasin.
Came in at night every day during the weekend to either start or finish an overnight growth. At this point we've miniprepped car and cdr of our final device so should be running the ligation to produce the sender cell soon.
