It's a Friday

Hello and welcome back!

This week at the Mayo Clinic has been quite eye-opening, especially when one realizes that one has been conducting an experiment wrong for the last two weeks.

Nevertheless, at the start of the week, everything was going smoothly. We were repeating the western blot, which had a strange result (it showed no effect on the cell lines) and we were midway through the RNA Analysis.

By the second day, the western blot was ready to be put into a gel to be read and we were using the PCR machine to make more RNA for later testing.

And then, come Friday, we had finally finished the Western Blot and had already put the RNA into the gel, when we decided to look back at the protocol and I realized that everything was wrong.

Well, not everything. I exaggerate. But, it happens to be a slight problem when you plate the cells at 5 times the concentration they’re meant to be at. If you recall, one of the first problems the experiment had run into when we were first analyzing it was that the drug did not work under high concentrations of cells. The cells are meant to be at a low concentration of 50K cells/ml and I, in all my infinite wisdom, had been plating the most recent cells at 250K cells/ml.

Oops.

Luckily, it’s easily solved and doing the experiments a third time over just means I’ll have a more experienced hand, right?

Right.

Thank you for reading!

Angela