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Thursday, March 31, 2016

Even more PCR and Electrophoresis (Legionella pneumophila Blog Week 7)


Hello everyone, this is week 7 of our journey through the S-STEM internship!  This week for our Legionella p. project, we had to run PCR on 10 different samples.  We ran the PCR on Tuesday and today we ran the amplified DNA in the Agarose Gel. Unfortunately, I goofed on 4 samples that I loaded (I loaded the gel wells with 7 microliters [μL] of material instead of 12μL).  Our mentor, Robin Cotter, advised us that it would be wise to run the PCR again on these samples and do the electrophoresis again in order to verify our results.  The reasoning is that; if the Legionella p. bacteria are present but there was not enough genetic material in the 7μL then it may not be visible when looking at the gels.  As for the remaining 6 samples that did run and ran well, we will be cutting out the clearly visible bands and performing a DNA extraction process from the gels so that we can send the samples to ASU for genomic testing. Once we know the sequence of the nucleotides, we can compare that to the known sequence of Legionella p. and know for sure that the bacteria were present in the samples that we collected.

That is all for now! Above is a picture of me on my birthday with Daisy one of my group mates.

P.S. Today is my birthday!

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