The good, the bad, and the agar bubbles
Hey! Well, sadly, I don’t have much exciting news to report about Thursday’s lab. We ran a gel to see if we successfully amplified our PCR product, but unfortunately, there seems to be contamination – either from the milliQ water in our negative control sample or from the PCR primer mix we used. Sadly, we have to run PCR again and hope for contamination free product! We are running both the old PCR primers and the inner nested ones in order to discern where the source of contamination came from. It seemed to be a general trend in the Tuesday/Thursday lab group that their sample was contaminated, so it could feasibly be either option. Looking at the colonies from our cultured plates was quite fun! We got to see some beautiful mold spores (not what we want, but still cool to look at), some interesting thick, slimy clear liquid on the surface of one plate, some orange colonies, some white colonies, and some yellow colonies – all with different morphology. We were really curious about this one colony, that was perfectly dome shaped and clear – however, we learned when we went to actually restreak the colonies…that those colonies were actually bubbles in the agar. Slightly embarassing, but also rather funny – we were really excited about those colonies too! We also had a few white colonies which were actually embedded in the agar, which meant they were not from our sample, but from bacteria that were present when the agar was poured. Luckily though, we did restreak atleast three different types of colonies and now we are just crossing our fingers and hoping both the restreakings are successful and the PCR!!
Keep you updated,
Ashley