New week, new conditions.

So, it's already Tuesday of my second week on my summer placement.  The days have gone so quickly!  Having had an exhausting but amazing weekend swing dancing, I was ready to see if my cells wanted to cooperate this week.

As you may remember, on Friday, I developed my blot, to find........  absolutely nothing at all.  The marker had just about transferred, but that was it, despite having looked at the gel, the bands I wanted had transferred onto the nitrocellulose sheet.

So, this week, like the weather here in Newcastle, I'm changing the conditions.  I'm adding salt, to make sure my reaction isn't electrostatic, as it looked like it could be that from staining the SDS gel.  I'm concentrating the samples more, and I'm using 10 well gels instead of 15, as you can get more sample in each well, which should give a clearer band.  

And today.......  I HAVE RESULTS!!!  This was a very pleasing finish to my longest day on my placement yet.  The bands are a lot clearer than the last, (though I think I made my gel a bit strangely, as the bands are a little wavy (I blame the acrylamide)) and the cells/proteins are doing more of what we thought they might do.  Overall a good day.

Even better, I'm looking forward to the results of my spot tests tomorrow, which I hunched myself over this afternoon, in order to make the perfect circle of liquid on my lovely smooth agar.  I've also found a use for my very useless skill of being able to write in mirror handwriting:  labelling the bottom of plates, so that I can see what it is when the plates are the right way round.

I also seem to have (finally after 4 years) mastered using moles.  For some reason I've always freaked out the minute I look at them.  Today's calculations were a success, without major panic.  Must find my own calculator though, Casio calculators just aren't my thing, thanks to a very determined statistics teacher that insisted on us using Sharps.

Will update on how the spot test and tomorrow's blot go soon.  Could be a while as I'm moving house this week, but I will try and post tomorrow.