Week 5: learning about PCR

I can’t believe it’s already week 5! On Tuesday only a few of us were there again, so I helped Stacey with some stuff. I made TGY media for her, divided the media into 10 different flasks, labeled them, and they were sent off to the autoclave. I’ve actually really enjoyed helping her out with stuff, even if it’s just simple things because I’ve been able to complete the tasks quickly by myself or with a partner. There’s no sitting around taking turns, which makes things take twice or three times as long as they normally would. On Friday, we took a look at the gels we did last Saturday and talked about them. We learned about how to read a gel, how a good gel should look, and what might cause a gel to not turn out right, such as an acid/base reaction caused from using 2 different types of buffers. We also prepared to do gel electrophoresis again for Saturday (earlier today) and learned the calculations for concentration, dye, buffer, and water, and we also prepared to do a plasmid miniprep again Saturday also. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a high enough concentration of cells when we nanodropped to do a plasmid miniprep today, so we prepared to run gels instead. I had to leave, so unfortunately I didn’t get to stay to make more gels. I swear the only times I’m ever not in lab are when we do gels! Grr, hopefully next time! We’re doing plasmid purification again, afterall!

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