The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades...

I'm a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes
Things are going great, and they're only getting better
I'm doing all right, getting good grades
The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades

 So, I'm not exactly studying nuclear science, nor am I awaiting impending nuclear war, but today was a really good day.

    I came in today to finish my labwork from yesterday, which would be to run the electrophoresis on all of my samples. This step would check whether or not I did everything right and if all the samples are good enough to send off to USC to be sequenced.

    I set up the electrophoresis apparati and started slowly loading up all of the samples on the gels I made yesterday . Loading up all of the gels takes a very long time and is very precise. Trying to keep your hand still while squeezing out a minuscule amount of liquid into an even tinier hole is no easy feat. But I'm really proud of myself; I didn't make any mistakes. In each of the gels I also added a DNA ladder, which acts as a reference to the sizes that the bands of DNA should be when the gel is done being electrophoresed.

   The electrophoresis chambers are hooked up to a battery and a current is run through the liquid and through the gels containing DNA. This process takes a while, up to an hour and a half.

        Well, I had started everything and the little gels that I had made were nearly done, when I realized that the big gel that I had made, which had 40 samples on it wasn't 'moving'! The tank was busted, I then had to gently take out the gel and try to find a tank big enough that would work, and then wait for another hour for it to run.

 In the mean time, Dr. Baker taught me how to use the UV light to take pictures of the gels. The first gel I took a photo of didn't really yield good results. 3 out of the 6 samples were useable. The second gel was much better, 5 of the 6 samples were good!

     I was really nervous about the big gel, because I thought that the results could go either way.

 Once the big gel was done, I placed it on the UV light box, turned off the lights and turned it on (only after putting on a protective UV face shield, of course!). The results were beautiful! All but 6 of the forty samples are good.

    Needless to say, I'm really happy, and really proud of my self. Also, I'm really exhausted from work and I haven't been sleeping that well.

Tomorrow, I'll be preparing the samples to be sent to USC for processing. Exo-Sap-It, Here I come!

Today's pictures: