Almost Spring Break!!!.....

This week did not start off so well. I got sick over the weekend and was not able to go to class on Monday...and I HATE missing class (I always seem to miss something really important if I do). However, I was able to copy notes from Cristi's lab notebook (thank you, Cristi!), so hopefully I know everything that happened on Monday. From what I understand, we talked about our paper and the format that it must be written in (IJSEM). We also plated out our dessication experiment which had been stored in an arid environment for 42 days. We also resuspended wells with soil liquid media and spotted this on the media it grew best on. Lastly, we performed PCR with Geo primers on DNA that had been extraced from soil. I think this protocol is posted on AirSet. I know I do not have a lot of detail written about this lab day...sorry! I'm hoping I can learn more about the exact steps we did on Monday from everyone else's blog!!!On Wednesday we spotted more of our liquid media samples onto 17 new carbon sources! I think I heard that some of the plates may have been mislabeled with the wrong carbon source....hopefully they were not so we don't have to re-do everything!!! After we spotted the plates containing the carbon sources, we incubated them at 25C. That incubator is getting very, very full! We also purified eight different PCR products using protocol from the internet called "UltraClean PCR Clean up Kit". I thought that this process was going to take a long time, like DNA extraction...but, it ended up being pretty simple. Dr. Rainey made some agarose gel and pipetted our samples into the wells for us....he said if we would've done this part, "we would've been there forever". Anyway, we must've done a fairly good job because we had nice, bright, pretty bands show up on the gel. The only problem is, only 6 bands showed up instead of 8. When I asked why this happened, Dr. Rainey said that maybe the DNA stayed attached to the filter instead of coming out into the tube like it was supposed to. Who knows. I hope everyone has a wonderful, sunny Spring Break!!!!!!