Project:Public Biobrick

Overview

UCL's igem team got in touch with us in May about a collaboration with their project to make a biobrick that could help to clean up plastic floating in the ocean. From August the biohackers have been working with them to develop a 'public biobrick' (ie. one developed outside of the traditional university or research lab). This biobrick contains antifreeze and mercuric reductase genes from the marine bacteria Oceanibulbus Indofilex.

Generating competent cells

The competent cells are what the biobrick is to be 'put into' at the end of the process. The procedure we followed is here. We built an [incubator with shaker] to achieve this. After 24 hours we did not see the expected colonies on the plates, we think this is because the streaks were cut too deeply into the growth medium. As an alternative we proceeded with some already prepared plates from UCL that did contain colonies.