Microbiology

During the second summer (2006) of my degree I worked in the Microbiology department at Dstl, with Dr Sarah Maddocks. I undertook a project to construct a suicide vector plasmid to create knockout mutants of a bacterial human pathogen. I went about this work by amplifying flanking regions of the desired gene/DNA fragment and then inserting these into a vector, propagating the vector in E.coli and then amplifying the constructed region of the DNA in the vector and inserting it into another vector to become the suicide vector. I learnt a number of valuable molecular techniques during the course of my time in this lab. I was only just able to succeed in getting the final vector product in the last days of my time here and therefore I was unable to produce a formal written report. I left the project ongoing for others to continue.