Still Life, part 1
I have the camera with me this week (yay!), so I brought it into work with me on Monday. As I was doing my experiment, I realized that I’m in a bit of a unique situation, in that there are tools and equipment that I use in my daily life that I pretty much take for granted. However, I’ve decided to take pics of them for two reasons.
1. Certain views of them can be pretty &/or semi-artistic.
2. With the way technology advances, these things may or may not be the tools that we use to do molecular biology in 5, 10, or 20 years.
Even within the 15 years that I’ve been doing research, I have seen techniques, that used to be considered standard, get phased out as the technique has become more automated. For example, I am one of the few people my age who have done DNA sequencing by hand (because I did it in my undergrad research project and for my work-study job). Right after that time period in 1996, a different kind of DNA sequencing became more affordable and individual labs quit spending time and energy doing it themselves. At this point, I don’t know of anyone who regularly does sequencing in their own lab anymore. Nowadays, you pretty much just send a sample of DNA to a sequencing facility (in house) and get the results back. tah-dah! No effort involved, except to trek the sample upstairs.
So, with this idea in mind that the kinds of techniques and tools I use today are likely to change in the future, I have decided to document some aspects of my experiments.
Here are some close-up views of my experiment on Monday.
First an overview shot of my protein gel. I don’t really want to get into a lot of detail about what each thing is or how it works… I just put this pic here so that the close-up shots can be put into a wee bit of context.
Next, a close-up of the swirling bubbles…
I also really like how a dye that intially appears purple in a tube, begins to separate into green and purple (and at one step pink).
If you look really, really closely, you might notice that there are two sets of 4, 5, 6, and 7, in the pic above.
I like this last image for the soft/fuzzy watery gel part of the image contrasted with the hard/solid very electronic part of the image.
AND you can see that the dye has now separated into a red/orange line and the blue lines.
AND, from a “good job on your experiment” standpoint, it ran really, really straight.
FINALLY, from This Gel, I got some of the BEST data that I’ve collected in a while (yesterday).
Amber says:
oooh pretty
My husband once interned for a company that made machines(err..robots) that did all the pipetting for you. He programed them.
So neat how technology changes so much in just a few years.
These pictures remind me when I did a summer program at Texas Tech University. I did a little bit of cloning and growing. Some of the stuff I did, I didn’t understand, though.
What sort of things are in the gel? And why the separation? You leave me to be intrigued.
Makes me want to change my mind and major in chemistry or biology.
LadyBug says:
The first two pics, and the one you called double_image_in_gel_box are my favorites. They’re very artsy-fartsy.
I’m glad you got some good samples that day. Maybe you should document it with your camera every time!
Ern says:
VERY NICE WESTERN! Protein gels hate me. They always frown.
Danielle says:
Amber, I’ll email you.
Ladybug, I was thinking about your comment today as I was doing a different part of a repeat of that experiment. “Should I pull out the camera? hmmmmm… nah. not really photoworthy today. Plus, no time.”
Ern, I had wondered if you’d come by. I had imagined that you’d recognize it, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Thanks for the compliment. These gels and buffers are pretty foolproof (I went with the pre-cast ones, since I needed gradients). I’ve decided the Invitrogen system is faaaaaaar superior to Bio-Rad’s (the pre-cast gels are good for more than 6 months).
Amber says:
At a “first glance, far away distance” the black something or other and the tm on the XCELL SureLock makes it look like it says “SureLocky”.
Oh geez.
I’ve seen those before but it never occured to me:
Sherlock.
Ha. Ha.
Now I feel dumb for not getting it until now.
Takes me a while to get jokes and stuff, you know. I’m pretty slow.