Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Restriction Mapping

Introduction:  in a DNA electrophoresis lab you use electric shocks to separate bands of DNA based on there length.  The longer the DNA the less it will go down the gel because of the resistance.  We have the DNA flow from negative end to positive end due to the negative charge of DNA in the phorphorous.  DNA is then able to be identified based on the length of each DNA observed if you are able to match up bands that means you are able to match up people.  This technique is used by law enforcement to identify criminals.  



Discussion: Our lab was a disaster. First off, we ripped our gel in half. Then we put it in the wrong way. So we had no results. For educational purposes we used Mr. Filipek's results as our own. First we examined the first lane and found there were two fragments, meaning it was cut in two places. The one fragment was about 700 long and the second one was about 4700 long. The total distance for each lane had to be about 5400. The second lane had three fragments, meaning it had three cuts. The one fragment was still 700 meaning the remainder had to be a total of 4700. We split that up into 2500 and 2200. The third lane had three cuts again, meaning three fragments. The 700 fragment still stood, we had a fragment that was 4200, and the final 500 was made up by the enzyme hpt1. In the last lane we put all of these results together into one fragment.


Conclusion: The lab is easy to map if you do it right. It helps not to rip the gel in half, and not to load it backwards. Other groups had much more desired results and by looking at those it is easy to see what DNA belonged where. Our results would've been much better if we were more careful with the materials.

Monday, March 16, 2015

E. Coli

LacZ

LB Agar- will grow any bacteria

LB/amp agar- contains ampicillin and luriobroth, screens for presence of plasmid in the bacteria LB/amp/ara- arabinose is raw material for the GFP gene to make green fluorescent protein. Gene araC, contains arabinose


Intro: Is is possible to create super bacteria that can glow in the dark and are antibiotic resistant. The purpose of this lab is to use Pglo and insert that into the bacteria. To make them resistant to antibiotics we will use ampicillin to kill off the week ones.


Discussion: The goal of this lab was to determine what solutions would show the most growth with bacteria and pGlo. The group that showed the most growth when held under the UV light was the container with LB/amp/ara. The reason for this is is because it had ampicillin to kill some bacteria, while it also had the arabinose to make it glow in the dark. That way the remaining bacteria would be antibiotic resistant.


Conclusion:  in the end we were able to successfully cultivate pglo in the ecoli.  We were able to see that when we integrated jellyfish DNA into certain cultures of ecoli depending on the environment that we put them in.  The pglo- never had a chance to glow because we never integrated the DNA and the pglo+ were able to glow.  Certain cultures were able to glow more because we added ampicillin to kill off excess bacteria.  Our cultures came out the way that we expected and we were able to cultivate more pglo ecoli than most of the groups in our lab.