Howdy!

To say that this week has been a resounding success in the lab would be a biiiiiit misleading. We experimented, and experimented, and experimented some more and just couldn’t see the data we wanted to see. We got some good data from out failures though, and I learned some new techniques in chemistry!

The first thing we did this week was some gel SDS-PAGE. It’s a method of separating charged molecules in mixtures by their molecular masses. It uses sodium dodecyl sulfate to help identify and isolate protein molecules.

The first part of the process is to make a matrix with the gel and some SDS. We did this the previous day so the buffers didn’t accidentally mix. Next we prepared the samples!

You actually have to heat up the protein samples so the proteins unfold. They tend to bunch up into little balls, so heating them up along with the SDS helps them to unfold.

After some heating, we squirt the samples into the gel matrix.

And then we wait and apply electricity. The samples move towards the negative pole based on their molecular weight. We had to wait several hours and…

This sample batch was a resounding failure. Oops! We tried several more times and eventually got it right. After you pull out the gel, you have to stain it with a blue dye called Coomassie. It makes the data much easier to read.

The round robin tours were a ton of fun, and I learned that all pretty much all scientists are horrendously messy people! It made me feel better about my lab.

See you next week!