Purpose/Objective

The purpose of today’s lab was to run our PCR samples from last lab through gel electrophoresis, analyze them under UV light, and to plan out our poster designs in our groups.

Purpose

Gel Electrophoresis

1. Place 1.8% agar gel from last lab in the gel electrophoresis tray. (Remember “run to red”)
2. Fill tray with 1X TAE solution so that the solution level is over the height of the gel.
3. Record how you plan to pipette the DNA ladder and PCR tubes into each well.
4. Pipette in 5 μL of DNA ladder.
5. In 6 other wells, pipette in 10 μL of the negative control, positive control, and environmental DNA for both groups.
6. Run gel at 100 Volts for 30 minutes.
7. Place gels under UV light and use BioRad Gel Imager to take a picture.

Results

Conclusion

I was incredibly disappointed that our 3 wells didn’t get the desired results. It doesn’t look like much of the rest of class did either. I am not sure at all what went wrong. If you go back a couple labs you can see that when our group previously did Chelex we had very good results. The only thing I can think of that we did differently this time was using the nanodrop machine and diluting our sample to get a DNA concentration of 51.15 ng/μL. We began planning out our posters in lab too. I think it would be cool to present our poster at the symposium because it’s a unique experience and it’s something you could put on resumes. But I don’t think that my group members want to do it, which really sucks because I don’t think I could do it alone.