Week 3: Plasmid Mini Prep...?

This week we were supposed to do the plasmid mini prep on Tuesday. Unfortunately, there was only 2 of us present, because some had to leave for class, so we ended up organizing the dry ingredient cabinet. It was type 2 fun; not really a fun thing to do, but we made it fun... and we were very proud after. 😊 Friday we all realized we had to take a research course and got that done, and when we finished that we prepared some things to do the plasmid mini prep Saturday. Come Saturday, we had everything out and ready. We noticed a mass floating around in the flask that contained our cells, and we weren’t sure if it was a biofilm (a mass of cells) or a fungus. We prayed for the former. We pipetted the solution into tubes to be put in the centrifuge, but we got no pellets. The mass floating in the flask was contamination, and apparently killed all of our cells. Yikes. So we prepared another flask, and we will check it on Tuesday and do the Plasmid Mini Prep then. Since we couldn’t do the mini prep Saturday, we ended up doing gram staining. 

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