Team:WashU/Week5

YLC

At the end of last week we ran a gel of the digests from the fluorescent proteins and extracted DNA from the gels. At the beginning of this week, we used the nanodrop to see how much DNA we had retrieved from the gel. The nanodrop revealed barely imperceptible maxima to indicate that we had almost undetectable amounts of DNA by the nanodrop. In fairness, the bands were tiny to begin with, leading to our poor results. Our mentors assured us that we probably had enough DNA for a ligation, so we plan to run that later on in the day. [MORE ON LIGATION]

We digested our new promoter, J23119, using the biobrick protocol, and ran a gel to ensure that we had pure promoter. We accidentally grew up the promoter in both plain LB and LB + amp, yet still had colonies in both media, and thus decided to run two digests to ascertain that we have our promoter in both cultures.

We have also decided to use PCR to amplify our DNA, as we are getting extremely low yields from our gel extractions. Thus, we have ordered PCR primers.