Bump on the Road

For some reason, I didn’t feel like myself this week because I would do little mistakes here and there (which I do my best to avoid). For example, when working on the QuickExtract DNA Extraction protocol, I would make a few mistakes that made a huge difference. For instance, the first step after centrifuging the bacteria is to remove the supernatant and then add sterile water. Instead, I did not remove the supernatant and added the sterile water, causing it to mix. This resulted in a low amount of DNA (Figure 1). I committed another mistake when I attempted to fix my first one. This time, I lowered the amount of bacteria I used and immediately put away my finished DNA in the refrigerator (when it should be left at room temperature for awhile). This error gave me an even less amount of DNA (Figure 2). Of course, I was bummed out (and still am) but I will be returning to take my time and pay close attention to what I’m doing. As the saying goes, you learn from your mistakes!

Figure 1. The graph of the first DNA extraction results (group A) displaying how much was absorbed during a certain wavelength. The colorful numbers to the left side correspond to the bacteria it is. "EC" stands for E.Coli, which is being used as the positive control. Note that the absorbance goes up to 40.

Figure 2. The graph of the second DNA extraction results (group B) displaying how much was absorbed during a certain wavelength. The colorful numbers to the left side correspond to the bacteria it is. Note that the absorbance goes up to 7.