Afternoon Quite a quick day today came into…

Afternoon,

Quite a quick day today, came into the lab stained and viewed our gel. We saw little/no separation from the Propionibacterium acnes 6919 strain restriction enzyme plugs and the non restriction enzyme plugs. However we did see separation from the NEB yeast.

Myself and Jo decided that this may be due to our newest plugs. As mentioned before one of the pipettes we were using was full of liquid, and therefore may have given us incorrect amounts of substances when being used. We were unsure as to whether this was resulting in no separations from plugs on our latest gel, so we decided to run another gel with 2 samples of our old Propionibacterium acnes 6919 strain restriction enzyme plugs, and 2 samples of our new Propionibacterium acnes 6919 strain restriction enzyme plugs, along with one sample of new non restriction enzyme plug and 1 sample of NEB yeast.

We are hoping that by doing this we can establish if the lack of separation is due to our new plugs being poor, or the settings recommended by the new ladder – low range PFG marker, not being quite right. We set up the gel ad ran it with the same settings as yesterday – 15hrs, 6 V/cm, 1-12 second switch interval ramping, 1% agarose, and then a second block to hold the gel at 0.6 Vcm, 5 second switch interval until tomorrow morning when we will be in to remove it, stain it and view it.

Filming our newest videoblog tomorrow… 🙂

Hey Everyone Came into the lab this morning…

Hey Everyone,

Came into the lab this morning to start to set up our next gel. I made up 3 L of TAE 0.5X, incubated 1 Propionibacterium acnes 6919 strain restriction enzyme plug and 1 non restriction enzyme plug in 1X wash buffer and then in 0.5X TAE buffer. I then made up a 1% agarose gel and left it to set. I put the gel and plugs into the fridge and left them until 5pm.

When i came in at 5pm, i cut and loaded 2 samples of Propionibacterium acnes 6919 strain restriction enzyme plug, 1 sample of non restriction enzyme plug and 1 NEB yeast ladder. I sealed the plugs and then ran the gel according to the info recommended on the low range PFG marker ladder, for 15hrs, at 6 V/cm, with a ramped switch interval from 1-12 seconds. I added a second block as the gel is only running for 15hrs, and will finish at 8.30am tomorrow morning, of 0.6V/cm for 2hrs with a 5 second switch interval.

We will hopefully have the new ladder tomorrow, so we can modify our new gel according to the results we get when the run finishes tomorrow and use the new ladder!

See you all tomorrow 🙂

Evening Everyone Didn’t come into the lab till…

Evening Everyone!

Didn’t come into the lab till the afternoon today. Once we got in we removed the buffer from the plugs, and incubated them further in 1X wash buffer for 30 mins, at room temperature. While this was incubating myself and Jo made up 3L of 0.5X TAE buffer, melted agarose and then poured a new gel. The buffer was then removed and replaced with some of the 0.5X TAE buffer, that will be used to run the gel, to allow equilibration. We then cut and loaded 3 samples of fully treated Propionibacterium acnes DNA, 3 samples of Propionibacterium acnes DNA not treated with the restriction enzyme (SpeI) and 1 sample of lambda Hind III as a reference ladder.

Finally we sealed the plugs in with agarose and set the PFGE to run for: 12.7 hours at 6.0 V/cm with a ramping of 1-8 seconds, then 7 hours at 6.0 V/cm with a ramping of 0.1-2 seconds. We haven’t tried ramping before, but we decided to try this set up, as it is the method used in one of the journals we have been working from. Ramping is where one switch interval is used at the beginning of a time run, and another is used at the end, therefore over the time period the ramping slowly changes.

Tomorrow we will be filming our next videoblog, removing, staining and viewing our gel. As mike won’t be in, we will be discussing modifications and a plan for next week on Monday.

See you all tomorrow! 🙂