Life of a Lab Rat

You know, before the jpeg loaded and reading it from an American bias, I thought there would be some picture of you with your fiancee or daughter or something.

Now you have to do it again with qRT-PCR?

heh heh.

(No; that's what grad students are for. I have to do it with an exon microarray.)

I'm just a lowly undergrad, but I still get happy when a gel goes right...simply because of all the times I've had a gel go wrong. I spent last spring semester helping with DGGE gels (and all the fun PCR work from nesting primers), and this summer I get to work on sds-PAGE gels. The success or failure of a gel tends to sit with the lab for the day.

...and I am curious of what the lanes 11 and 12 are controls for?! 11 I can guess maybe for the lower band but 12??

(and no, you don't have to answer, research priveliges and all. Just letting you know my first thoughts after "Oh, I wish my gel could be as clear!")

They're cDNA controls. 11 is the coding sequence of the gene we're interested in, 12 the empty (GFP) vector.

I've been keeping the TM low because this PCR was giving me a bit of trouble, which is why there's non-specific bands in the top row.

That lower band appears to be primers/dNTPs.

Yay!

"that's what grad students are for" --> =-P

I'm having a bad case of "ugly sds gel syndrome" this week, good do hear someone's experiments are going well!

I should add that this is the first time since the middle of last year that this experiment has actually worked. *sigh*

Um, if you're validating the results by qPCR (in triplicate I'm sure), why bother with the exon array? Nasty, messy, expensive things.

Because the exon microarray is kind of the point.

thanks. That made my day less confusing... or at least there was an answer which I don't see in my own experiment at the moment ;)

Great! Just so you are more careful next time, primer (dimers) is alright, not dNTPs.