Day 7

Today was quite a busy day. I was able to help other people in the lab with their experiments aswell as my own.

There isnt a lot to report about my own experiment. I had a look at the plates I began to grow yesterday but there wasnt really any good signs of growth and so I put them back to grow another night, I really hope something grows!!!

Apart from that I got to help and carry out parts of the procedure for making "DNA plugs". DNA plugs are literally DNA encased in agarose gel. In this form the DNA can be stored and then used in further experiments. In the interest of our group further experiments will probably be to view the remaining structures of chromsomes to see which parts have been lost (which markers etc). This procedure was very interesting, it involved using a microscope to count cells to make sure there were enough in each culture sample, some centrifugation, cell lysis and finally creation of the agarose plugs, its a procedure ive never heard of before working here and its a really good idea.

Ive also begun running a fluctuation test, its on a different experiment to my own, like the DNA plugs were but it was good practice for when I hopefully get to do my own. Ive begun by making up the 14 cultures to be left over night, they are my 7 wild type and 7 mutant samples. I will be taking cell number measurements from both in correlation to their generation number and working out mutation rates.

Tommorow I will hopefully be carrying on with my main experiment and also the fluctuation tests.