Absentee

I haven’t posted on this blog for about a week. This is about to be rectified with a really long post.

I made a rather unfortunate but largely unavoidable mistake last week by being absent for half of it to instead commit my precious time to such frivolous and inane things as making dresses. Having heard me griping about The Dress for several weeks and having had to put up with hearing about How Much Effort It Is, my faithful iGEM friends promptly agreed in the Friday meeting that I would have the hardest labwork. Tom optimistically told me that at least my part of the project had the most glory attached to it. He also told me I had to persuade a non-bioscientist to be my lab partner. Ryan chose that moment to walk into the room. Fool. If I must go down, he is coming with me. Ha. Ha ha ha.

On another note, having spent…how long was it? A week and a half? Let’s say a week and a half for the sake of argument. Having spent a week and a half messing around with Gibson primers, having to remake them as the project changed course slightly several times and undertaking the laborious process of double-checking them, Tom has been to Paris for the big teachers’ meeting and discovered that Gibson is not the rosy, angelic road of opportunity we thought. How we have been mislead. So it’s clear, as Tom said, that there isn’t enough data on Gibson or biobricking to make a clear judgement between the two. Since biobricks are the accepted format for iGEM, we’re mostly using that, and we also want to produce a proper comparison of Gibson and biobrick as a little side project. May it be our legacy to later iGEM generations. Assuming my part of the project works. Which I pessimistically feel is unlikely.

I could write much more, but I spontaneously feel I must do something else. Possibly talk to Tom, since Alex has just confused me again and now I really don’t know what we need for primers. Time to go discover my direction in life.

Mary B.