View source for WEEK NINE (March 12 - 16)

We met and discussed your work on the X-Prize challenge. We appreciate your work and like your approach, but we do not believe that gates 3, 4, or 5 will function as designed. Therefore, your assignment for this week (due at 5 p.m. on Thursday) is to take a solo Fix, Ditch, or Convince approach to each gate. 


In other words, '''work by yourself''', without discussion with each other, to either come up with a way (or ways) to Fix each design so that it works, or argue convincingly that the design cannot be fixed (Ditch), or argue convincingly that the gate works as designed (Convince). To help you with this assignment, you should take a look at the link on the wiki (Week Nine) about enzymes cutting near the ends of sequences. [http://www.neb.com/nebecomm/tech_reference/restriction_enzymes/cleavage_olignucleotides.asp#.T1e7HJjufqE How close to the edge can a restriction enzyme cut?] And to bolster your arguments about why gates work or do not work as designed, it would be helpful to count (and label) the number of bases in a coding sequence under each possible outcome. 


Each person should email his or her written responses (in Word or PPT) with accompanying figures to both Drs. H. and C. no later than 5 pm Thursday. We will evaluate each written response. 


This Thursday at Common Hour, the two of us will discuss a Powerpoint presentation from our collaborators at Missouri Western that raises some new research questions and ideas, which we will investigate over the following two weeks, as outlined on the wiki. 


Drs. Heyer and Campbell will present this [[Media:Programming_Bacteria_for_Optimization_of_Genetic_Circuits.pptx]] PPT file from our collaborators at MWSU].