S-STEM Scholar Baylee Herman's blog

3/21/18 Dr. Tuohy gave us a project to begin for transferring DNA of D. Gobi and D. Grandis. We briefly touched on how the cell will retain the plasmid and how we will be learning the process of heat shock. We began to look into the scientific paper which was a bit challenging, we skimmed through to find the information we needed. This process is very useful for cloning.  3/24/18 Today we did a PCR Chain Reaction and created a gel. We used the 2, 5, and 7 micro liter pipettes to insert the dye into our gel. The main focus was not puncturing the wall of the gel so we did not get any smearing. In the end our gel turned out the way we had hoped, we anticipated results within the 800 range. The third sample we used showed no results and the NO DNA column was clear which we were looking for as well.

3/10/18 For this week in lab, the initial process we learned was making a broth that would eventually have the bacterium added to it. We gathered all the materials and prepped 2 sizes of broth to create. The steps were simple as we weighed out each component carefully. The mixture was created then stirred on a hot plate with a stirring rod inside. This was then stored after proper labeling for later use. On the same day we performed a gram stain this process to me seemed to be one we will use often in lab. We followed the proper steps using heat fix then the 4 steps to staining. The results were the best part in which we saw results in the microscope. This was found to be gram positive.