Singer RoToR Fixup

You may remember the Singer RoToR, our colony replicator. This is a great device, but recently it has been erratic in lifting on of the plate lids.

We contact the nice people at Singer who sent us instruction on how to tune the sensor on the arm. This is very similar to an issue we had in the past with device after it was filled with agar. Tuning the sensor solved the problem but it would reappear.

Last week we got an email from Ian at Singer that he believes the problem is with a faulty relay in the electronic board. It turns out that the device (which is very thoughtfully  designed) comes with a spare relay. Ian sent us detailed instructions on how to fix this. The only problem was that it required opening the back panel --- meaning that we need to move the device.

We opened the instructions for securing the arm and plates. Fixed everything in place, again the design was such that given the instructions it was a piece of cake. We then moved the whole device onto a table.

Removed the back panel,

and switched the old relay with the spare one.

In 10 minutes we had the device back on the original table and working.

I can't say enough how impressed I am with the design and operation of the RoToR. It looks as though every aspect was thought of in advance, including how to best guide remote operators in dealing with issues and fixing problems. I'd wish some of the other devices we bought were that well thought out.

Ian also noted that they came up with a new board that does not requires these relays which can fail. So sometime soon we will do an upgrade to the new board. Given the ease of maintenance of the device, I am looking forward to that.

Renovations updates - "Yeast Mating Room"

As we wait for the final touches on the main molecular lab room, the workers started working on a small side room.

This room will serve as the "Yeast Mating" room. It will have a place for the Singer RoToR, the MasterClave and agar preparation station, an incubator, and supplies for all of these. The idea is that the room will be a more or less autonomic workstation for researchers interesting building and manipulating yeast libraries.


Since this is a small room, we hope the work will progress quickly. The workers tore down the existing interior. Then they rebuilt the foundations of the wall with the neighboring office (to support shelves and to allow for insulation).

The following day the electricians came in and put the tubes for placing the electricity wires.

Today, the plaster wall was finished, and tomorrow we should have tiles in place.

Let there be light!

After long delays, today the new lab was connected to the electricity system. The electricity crew came in at 6am and was supposed to be done by 10am.

At 3pm when Ilan and me came in, we found them still working on the main board.

Turned out that the 30+ year switches failed and had to be repaired. This meant that the internet connection for the whole wing was disconnected throughout the day and that our lab and neighboring lab had limited electricity.

Nonetheless, and by that time against all expectations, the crew managed to fix the board, and we got to see lights going on in the new lab!

Ilan

Ilan Wapinski, a long time collaborator, is visiting Israel for Naomi's wedding. Today we spent several hours together. First we had technical chat with Naomi.

Then we went for lunch at one of the nicest places in town for food - MachneYuda restaurant. This was a combination of cool discussion and tasty food. We sat on the "chef bar" and so also had the whole kitchen staff as entertainment.

Naomi's Wedding

Last night we (all the group) attended Naomi's wedding. It took place in a meadow in a wooded parks on the hills south-west of Jerusalem. We arrived there toward sunset and had a chance to see the forest view and the rolling hills, and then the sunset. The ceremony was at twilight time with the first stars coming out.

It was a happy, energetic and and fun event. We mostly concentrated on the dance "floor" which was full of people, young and older, with an eclectic mix of dance music.

Short renovations update

Nothing much happened on site this week. But still some updates.

* Next week, we hope, the electricity board will be connected and maybe the new molecular lab would be declared "done".

* Next Sunday work on the small equipment room, where the Singer and the MasterClave will reside, starts. Due to the delays in the renovations on the robotic room, the contractor promised to make fast progress here.

* The one piece of missing furniture in the molecular lab - storage cabinets for consumables - has been finally designed and call for proposals is out. Hopefully we will have it done in two-three weeks.

* We are starting advanced stages of the furniture and electricity design for the robotic room.  

Our first GFP-RFP strain

On aspect of the lab that I haven't wrote about much is our Scan^R microscope. The problem is that I planned to explain it with a lot of details, which meant that this post was being postponed everytime.

In the mean time, however, we have been using it quite a lot. For our purposes, we need strains that contain the right fluorescent markers. We relay on the use of  proteins, such as the Green Fluorescent Proteins (GFP) that are inherently fluorescent. This means that when the protein is expressed (made by the cells) we can measure it.

To setup experiments we need to make sure the cells express these proteins in response to the conditions we want to test. As our first attempt in that direction we combined strains expressing GFP attached to different native proteins (one per strain) with a strain that Avital built that expresses a protein called mCherry (a variant of Red Fluorescent Protein or RFP) in a constitutive way. This means that all cells are marked in red, which helps focusing on them and also defining the area of the cell.

We had some set backs with getting the mCherry strain to work, but after some detective work by Avital, she overcame the technical issues. Last week Avital managed to get her mCherry strains to mate with the GFP strains. And next week we are supposed to get the final product of haploid cells with the two markers. In the mean time she took images of the diploid cells, and they look good.

In red:

In Green:

And an image made by overlaying these two images:

You can see that (almost) all cells are red (with varying degrees). Some cells have green in the nucleus (sharp points in the middle of the cells), suggesting that this protein is nuclear one and has variable level of expression under the conditions we measured.