Three New sponsors!

The University of Leicester iGEM Team are amazed to tell you about not just one, not two, but we have three new sponsors to the team! These have been over the course of the last 6 weeks however because we have been snowed under with deadlines, lab work, and wiki'ing its taken a while to get the post written.

The first of which has come in the form of reagents company Thermofisher Scientific which now includes Fermentas which we have been given some very useful reagents which we have been busy using in the lab. These include the Sau3A1 we have been using to create a DNA Library and the PCR cloning kit we have been using for the extraction of the 16S RNA sequences from our unknown CSE kit bacteria to try and find out which species we have growing on our selection media. Without these it would have been very expensive and difficult to get the reagents so we thank our new sponsor greatly! Also thanks to our supervisor Dr Dalgleish for managing to get the team the sponsorship.

We are proud to say that the second new sponsor is in fact the British Plastics Federation, EPS division. Who became our sponsor in August after Christopher arranged a visit from the chairman David Emes to the meet the team and discuss about the project. After a long talk over a coffee and a tour of the lab we got back to lab work. Later in the week we found out that they were going to give us £1,500 towards the entrance fee allowing the team to get into the Jamboree at the VU University Amsterdam. This was amazing news! As it was only the day before the visit we were getting extremely worried about paying for the entrance fee.


The third new sponsor and the most recent was in the form of three boxes of reagents from New England Biolabs with some lovely competent cells to express our biobricks in, as well as lots of DNA ladders, ligases, and PCR cloning kits which have been of great use in the last few days of lab work as we had used up all of the ThermoFisher stock. Unfortunately after some problems with our DNA we was unable to make a biobrick, however these cells will be of great use to next year's team as we have left the project at a point ready to make biobricks.



As we are now coming to the end of the project, all of our lab has been packed away, DNA has been put into storage and our main strains we have been working on have been frozen down to be kept for next year's team. All CSE kits we have had returned are currently in storage as well, happily growing on plates.
Don't forget, there is still time to get your hands on the E-Quiz, and fund us on Rockethub! However be quick as the deadline is approaching


Thank you for reading,

Christopher Morton
Project leader

e-Quiz Goes Live!

We have now launched our online e-Quiz, helping to make the team accessible to everyone who has a computer and a internet connection. The e-Quiz allows you to take part in a fun quiz with various rounds, including history, science, riddles and many more (including an iGEM round, which teaches you a little about us and the project) - and of course you get the chance to win some fabulous prizes! At the moment the top price is an official University of Leicester iGEM Team t-shirt which all of the team wear with pride, with additional prizes for runners up to be confirmed (you can also get your hands on a t-shirt through our Rockethub by the way). The winner of the quiz will be the person who answers the most correct questions of all of the entrances so don't worry if you can't answer all of them. Also, the quiz isn't all science; there are some general knowledge questions as well to keep everybody involved.


How can I get my hands on one?
It's simple! Entrance is £1.50 and can be bought easily here on the blog, just click on the PayPal button at the top left of the page, or click on the link here if you are viewing this by Mobile Blogger and want to buy a single entrance: https://www.paypal.com/UoL-EQUIZ. The e-Quiz is open to everyone, and the deadline for submitting your answers is 8th October 2012. If you do not have a PayPal or wish to buy using an alternate method don't hesitate to email the team at igem@leicester.ac.uk or talk to one of our team members in person.

Good Luck Everyone!



As this is an e-Quiz, there is a honesty clause of not using the internet for the answers (apart from on the iGEM and blog round), and to keep this fun and fair to everyone we have put in some riddles and questions to get you thinking.

Christopher Morton
Project leader