Updates

Q3 July 2016

Info Needed:

• status of Indiegogo perks
• how money has been spent so far
• PR, outreach and media events
• Maggi's process flow chart
• where we're at/what we've learned since our last status updates

Draft:

Hi Folks,

We’re long overdue for an update, so here goes! We’ve been hacking away at Oakland Lab space, and helping to support our sponsoring non-profits, Omni Commons and Counter Culture Labs to obtain their 501 3C status. We’ve also taken inventory of the Indiegogo perks that we started sending out X months ago. Everyone should have received their perks, or at least heard from us about it recently, but if you haven’t then please contact us at XXXX because we really want to make sure that no one slips through the cracks. Also, it turns out that we’ve done a really good job of bootstrapping a lot of the supplies that we’ve needed (we are a DIY community group after all), but that also means we’ve done a rather poor job of spending the funding that we’ve raised, so we’re going to work on that. Here’s a quick breakdown of our budget, for those of you who are interested <include link>

Some other quick mentions of RVC in the news are: - Ben spoke at Tech Tuesday for Oakland Vegetarian Week - Patrik interviewed by KQED radio - Mention of the invite to be interviewed - Upcoming conferences….

Now for the important stuff: project status. Rather than just tell you what we’ve been up to, we thought it would be better to show you where we’re at, and explain to you some of what’s going on:

<Insert Process Flow Charts> <Discussion of where we’re at> We’ve marked with “o” where we were in our last updates, and below are some of our learnings from these:

● Synthesized 11 cow and human casein and kinase DNA constructs as IDT gBlocks.

● Cloned into Electra pD1214 plasmid backbone (IP-free!).

● Transformed into E. coli to produce tons more plasmid.

● Sequence confirmation for 10/11 constructs (we are troubleshooting the 11th gene construct)

Up next:

● Casein expression in yeast! (pD1214 plasmid carries a strong constitutive TEF yeast promoter).

● Verify expressed protein on SDS gel. Expression of kappa casein can be verified by cleaving/phosphorylation with chymosin.

● Precipitate caseins by changing pH, calcium concentration.

● Scaling up production of caseins in a larger bioreactor.