PCR and Electrophoresis... Again

Similar to the past 3 weeks or so, I performed electrophoresis and PCR. Slowly but surely, I am making some progress. Last week, I had electrophoresis results that were quite useless. As a reminder, I obtained gels that did not have any visible DNA. After figuring out what the problem was, which was that the SyberGreen-DNA was old/bad, I created another gel and used new SyberGreen-DNA. After obtaining the results, my DNA still wasn’t visible (Figure 1). I then adjusted the amount of post-PCR DNA each slot had from 4 mircoliters to 20 microliters. Finally, this adjustment did show DNA but not for all of my samples (Figure 2). In order to try to get all of the slots to show DNA, instead of using 2 mircoliters of DNA during PCR, I dropped the amount to 1 mircoliter. I will run these samples under electrophoresis next week and hopefully all the slots show DNA!

Figure 1. Electrophoresis results after using new SyberGreen-DNA. The order of the slots, from left to right is as follows: MW Ruler, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. The post-PCR DNA samples were in PCAT primer set. 

Figure 2. Electrophoresis results after using 20 microliters of post-PCR DNA in each slot. The order of the slots, from left to right is as follows: MW Ruler, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14. The post-PCR DNA samples were in PCAT primer set.