25th May 2016 – Day 3

No sleep last night, my loud neighbours decided to party until 4am …… not great when you plan on getting up at 6.30 am (note to self;  buy earplugs today), going to work tired is not recommended.

Today was busy again, there were a lot of instructions and loads of bits and pieces to do all over the lab. Dr Amy Cherry had some interviews to conduct and gave me a list of instructions and left me to it. They were fairly easy to follow and I managed to finish with plenty of time spare, which I used to chat to some of the technicians about their work and we spoke about what it is like to work in the lab.
Today I took an OD reading followed by a 1ml sample of each (for the gel) from the cultures I had induced overnight. I made an SDS running buffer and then used all of the samples from yesterday and today and ran them on the gels we made up yesterday. 100V then 180V for just over an hour, after which point the gel was stained with Coomassie blue (which turned any proteins visible into a pretty blue colour), then I added de-stain which only removes stain from the non-protein sections of the gel. 
The rest of the cultures were centrifuged and the pellets placed in the freezer (we will use these in a couple of weeks for our western blots). The streak plates that I cultured overnight were removed from the incubator (I always find the LB broth gives off a strange smell, similar to potatoes…always makes me hungry!), a single colony was removed from each and placed into a liquid culture along with antibiotics and this was cultured overnight.
I manged to get a chance to do a little research on PCR primers that I will need for the second half of this study, I have not worked with these primers yet so this was interesting.

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