Natural or not?

A wonderful lecture from Marta de Menezes kicked off the last week of theory. Marta is an artist from Portugal who runs Cultivamos Cultura, the leading institution devoted to experimental art in Portugal and Ectopia, dedicated to facilitate the collaborative work between artists and scientists. She took us on a journey through her work in which she challenges definitions of nature and identity, natural and artificial, especially in the age of CRISPR. Incredibly inpiring talk.

The rest of the week we went hands-on into synthesizing the sg HL3 DNA that had been ordered beforehand by Kas, plus the PAM and the scaffold. It arrives as DNA instead of RNA, because that structure is much more stable, RNA (a half helix) can be damaged very easily when handles or transported. We then made RNA from it, using the RNA polymerase enzyme, and added DNAse to remove all remaining DNA. As a next step, we cut the RNA in vitro.

Unfortunately, as things took a bit more time than expected, we haven’t had the chance to go through the follow-up steps of checking with gel electrophoresis whether the cutting has been successful.

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