S-Stem Scholar Kathleen Corfman's Blog

This week we ran some gels. We had 3 out of 4 samples show! FR100 did not show, so we inoculated a flask with it, and did DNA isolation. We also realized that we got samples 6 and 7 mixed up. What a pain! But I’m glad we noticed, whew!  This week was a little slower than normal because some of the stuff we had to do took longer than the amount of time we had in the lab, but that’s ok! Good week! I hope PCR on FR100 went well! If it does, we’ll be doing a gel. 

This week I helped Stacy with a crystal violet assay. I’ve never done one before, so this was new for me! It wasn’t too complicated, but it was tricky because of the precautions we had to take to prevent contamination.  I also did gram staining on Saturday. I gram stained aquatilis, and Caeni. Some of the results were a bit odd. The Caeni was cool to look at. I’m used to looking at Deinococcus species. The   Caeni was gram positive circles, stuck very tightly together in pairs that almost looked like rods, and then those were all attached to each other in long chains. Super cool!  Here’s a picture below.

This week we did a gel on Tuesday, 1/4/2020. I came in late, so they were already in the middle of it. This was for samples 1, 7, 8, and 14. Nothing showed, possibly because the gel was too thin and hardened inconsistently.  We discussed options, and decided Chad would run PCR again and run a gel on the 4 samples again. He succeeded in getting 1, 7, and 8 to show, but not pimensis.  1/7/2020 We did DNA isolation on pimensis. The numbers were low, only 27 ng/micro Liter, so we did DNA isolation on pimensis again on 1/8/2020. We are awaiting to use the nanodrop to get the results for this DNA isolation. 

This week we were super busy. We did gram staining on the 9 samples that didn’t show up in the gels, and then we did DNA isolation on the samples that turned out good on the gram stains. The isolations that gave us good numbers on the nanodrop we did PCR on, which was only 4. I also helped nanodrop some samples of pimensis and xinjiang in different media’s for Stacy, and got those prepared for gram staining. Haven’t gotten to look at them under the microscope yet!