Dried Mosquitoes and PCR Round 1
Hey everyone! This was a busy week in Superlab. On Monday we had our first journal club of the quarter, where we discussed the paper “Control of Drosophila Gastrulation by Aplical Localization of Adherens Junctions and RhoGEF2” by Kolsch, et al. I’ll post the link below if you’re interested in reading more about it. Unlike last quarter, we have three journal clubs this quarter, so rather than each lab section presenting on a particular day, we divided into groups based on which paper we wanted to present (I’m presenting tomorrow on actin-myosin networks in constriction during gastrulation), and groups of two or three people present the various figures from the paper. During lab days this week, we performed genomic DNA extractions and set up the first round of PCR with our first set of primers to begin gene amplification. On Wednesday we were given small dried mosquitoes, and our task was to grind them up and extract DNA from them using a series of reagents we prepared in lab last week. On Friday, we measured the concentration of our genomic DNA preparations using a little instrument called a Nanodrop that used absorbance readings from our samples to measure concentration of DNA. Unfortunately, our preparation had a relatively low concentration of DNA (luckily, most people in the class had low concentrations, so it wasn’t that abnormal), but we’re going to go ahead and use it, so hopefully it works! If not we should have time to go back and re-perform the DNA extraction if necessary. Along with measuring DNA concentration, we set up the first round of PCR on Friday to amplify specified sequences of DNA using the first set of primers we designed in the first week of lab. If all goes well, the week after Thanksgiving we should be able to run a gel on both our first and second rounds of PCR (we’ll be doing the second round in lab this week), and hopefully we’ll see product! If not, we’ll have to go back and troubleshoot, but we’ll cross that bridge when we reach it. Until then, we have journal clubs and PCR to work on! Have a great Thanksgiving everyone!
Journal club article 1: Control of Drosophila Gastrulation by Apical Localization of Adherens Junctions and RhoGEF2
Journal club article 2: Pulsed contractions of an actin–myosin network drive apical constriction