After a rather disastrous Winter with flooding and other
problems at CCL, and the closure of one of our other Bay Area labs due to
financial limitations, we are recovering. Spring has been a time of growth and
progress for project GRFT. Micropropagation
of rice by Hector Vera on agar has got the early problems with contamination
under control and cloning is progressing nicely using a progression of media. We now have plates with happily growing rice
calluses that we are continually preparing for transformation by particle
bombardment. Hector is finishing up a
lab complete with a gene gun. UCB
students Allison Nakagawara and Maya Douglas joined the project and have been working
on preparation of media and buffers, monitoring callus growth and cloning the
calluses. David Alfred Johnson, PhD and
David Finn have teamed up to work on the nozzle end of the gene gun. 3d printed
parts had ragged edges and were not able to withstand the temperatures in the
autoclave. David Johnson has built two
gene guns, one is at CCL and Hector has the other one. David Finn has located a high-temperature
printer to print the parts with clean edges and able to withstand the heat of
autoclaving. In earlier experiments the
blast from the gun blew the target plant material completely off the
plate. The solution being tried now is
to place the target between to disks of stainless steel fine mesh inserted into
the nozzle. Sreenivas Eadara and the
team at Johns Hopkins are working on assembly of the plasmid construct under
the guidance of Noam Prywes, PhD (who is doing a research project at UCB to
explore rubisco biochemistry and chloroplast transformation technology in
plants).
Photo taken on the 15th of July 2022 at Counter
Culture Labs in Oakland, CA.
From left to right: Allison Nakagawara, Maya Douglas, David Finn, Eddy Spinner, David Johnson, and Hector Vera.
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