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