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From 2012hs.igem.org

Contents 1 Team 2 Project 3 Notebook 4 Results/Conclusions 5 Safety 6 Attributions 7 Human Practices 8 Fun! 9 Sponsors

Team

BVCAPS Research KS is a team of wonderful highschool kids unified in solving science problems through genetic engineering. The members attend a variety of schools in the Blue Valley School District, but became unified at the excellent Blue Valley CAPS profesional studies center, geared towards getting the students real world experience. Once together in the Bioscience Research class, they recognized their vast potential, and aimed it at the iGEM competition.

Members:

• Austin Rottinghaus a.k.a. Steady Hands

• Brandon Whitcomb a.k.a. Beast from Butler

• Tim Schaefer a.k.a Schaef-cat Hopkins

• Graham Wehmeyer a.k.a. Green Cali Mojo

• Vivek Menon a.k.a Pokemon Master

Project

Our project, in essence, designs the perfect alarm clock. The presence of a strong wintergreen smell is used to help the user wake up, heightening their senses. At night, when no light is present, a banana odor produced will assist in calming down the user, helping them go to bed. All in the absence of electricity through pure biological systems.

This system is the combination of the MIT and University of Texas teams' projects from years past. We are making a combined genetic circuit with the smell of the bacteria (banana or mint) depending on the time of day (presence of light). The light receptor protein, obtained from photosynthetic algae, turns the banana smell on in the absence of light, and the mint smell on in the presence of light.

Notebook

3/20/2012

Today we attempted to build a circuit and added our project description. We also tried to select parts to be used in our biological system, we selected a promoter that functions as coliroid and is named BBa_R0082

3/21/2012

We worked on selecting the parts we need and selected two mint producing parts we could attempt to use BBa_J45004 and BBa_J45099. The banana producing part is BBa_J45199, an enyzme generator that creates an enzyme to catalyze the process that causes isoamyl alcohol to break down into isoamyl acetate, which smells like bananas.

3/26/2012

Today we are working on creating the system through Tinker Cell so we have a visual of it and can continue from there. We found that the light receptor used by University of Texas is called Cph8 part name BBa_I15010. We figured out we need to create 3 genes for our plamsid because we need one to code for the light receptor and molecule that activates the mint smell gene and inhibits the banana smell gene.

Results/Conclusions

What did you achieve over the course of your semester?

Safety

We had taken classes before were we had to learn about lab safety and were told any addition instructions that we must be warned about as we worked on the project.

At all times when chemcals were being used:

• Lab coats were on
• Saftey goggles were on
• Gloves were worn
• No flames were ever unattended
• At the end of every day (if bacteria was used) the tables were disinfected and clean off/pick up any chemicals that were left out.

Attributions

Who worked on what?

Human Practices

What impact does/will your project have on the public?

Fun!

What was your favorite team snack?? Have a picture of your team mascot? Donut Club

Sponsors

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