Blog Post Week 3

Sample gel positive on far right
(lane 8)

 So far for the pseudomonas project we have done gel electrophoresis (This is where we check for banding of our PCR product that tells us if we have positives if we have banding or negatives which shows no banding). We ran our gels and there was some banding but there were troubles with the PCR, while preparing some samples did not contain the full 25 microliter needed for the PCR. We came in again to run PCR on all of the samples. The whole preparation for PCR went much smoother this time around, the appropriate amount of DNA, PCR water, and forward/reverse primers were added. All that’s left to do for those samples is to do gel electrophoresis. If we have positives we hope to do DNA gel extraction to send our samples to DNA sequencing at Arizona State University. This week I have also began to look at protocols for separating microplastics from soil samples. This is still in the early stages; we are still trying to see which protocol is the best to use. This is really new to me but I am excited to begin learning something new. I hope to learn new skills with this project. I will still be working with Legionella and Pseudomonas in addition to the new project.

PCR preparation

Microplastics Protocol

Gel electrophoresis