Week 1 Lab: Pipetting

Pipetting & eGels

In this week’s lab, we were tasked with familiarizing ourselves with standard pipetting equipment. We utilized P20, P200, and P2000 micropipettes, along with petri dishes and glass slides. Having prior experience in a wet lab, it was fun to explore the equipment artistically.

I started by creating some “droplet art” on a glass slide using colored water.

I then decided to make a smiley face and a DNA strand in the same fashion, pipetting individual droplets of colored water and “streaking” them to create lines.

I noticed another labmate using petri dishes for her art. Given the hydrophobic coating on the plate, the droplets formed more uniform spheres that maintained their geometry better than on the glass slides. I proceeded to create another drawing on the petri dish.

Finally, we used an eGel, a piece of technology I had never seen before. I was thoroughly impressed—no loading buffer, no separate imaging box, and no dye required. The process was incredibly streamlined. Another classmate and I alternated pipetting the provided ladder sample and dH2O into the lanes of the gel. The eGel even allows for mid-run imaging, which I was delighted to take advantage of.

The first lab has definitely made me excited to get my hands on the rest of the equipment we will use in this class, and it provided a nice artistic lens through which to view a simple task like pipetting. :)

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Week 2 Lab: DNA Gel Art

Lab: DNA Gel Art

Today in lab, we attempted to make DNA Gel Art using restriction enzymes and software (Benchling). In recitation, we were given an example of someone using time-controlled gel work to create an image, so I came up with a plan to use that framework to create an image of Pac-Man.

I used SalI, which cuts only a single 500 bp strand from lambda DNA, for my digest to create my “blocks” that I would effectively “stack” as I pipetted them at interval times on the gel.

I worked with another classmate, Devorah, and together we created our gel with the agar and TAE buffer, and ran our gels at 150+ volts.

Devorah tried to make a dragonfly-looking structure, which required a variety of restriction enzymes. After making our gel, we let our digest reactions incubate for 30 minutes, then created the loading samples and ran the gels. I set serial, 4-minute timers that prompted me to pipette the next “row” to create my pacman image.

After I was finished, my gel took an unfortunate tumble to the ground, and was imaged in pieces.

In the end, it looks like the digestion did not go according to plan, as no DNA appeared to have traveled down the gel, and only the dye created the facade image. However, It is also entirely possible that by serially pipetting into the same wells, a buildup of DNA occurred and the 500bp strands that were supposed to fall into place got stuck (I am less inclined to believe this, though, because I would expect at least 1 500bp band to make it to the bottom, and none were present effectively). Overall, this was a fun project, and I took pleasure in trying to come up with an alternative approach to execute my creative goal, eventhough my results didn’t come out as expected.

Devorah’s design also wasn’t quite what we were expecting, and I think its also related to an improper digestion reaction.

Gemini AI was consulted for formatting

Week 3 Lab: Opentrons

This week in lab, we used the Opentrons machine, giving us a taste of lab automation with an artistic twist. We pipetted flourescent, genetically engineered E.coli onto agar mixed with activated charcoal to create our design and canvas respectively. After a 16 hour incubation period, we were able to see images of our results under UV light! I decided to make two designs, one of the US Virgin Islands to pay homage to where I’m from, and the other was the Dark Side of the Moon Album Cover, as I thought it used a good variety of colors. The robot moved from top left to bottom right, which prompted a discussion with Ronan about the most optimal pathing system for the trajectory. The robot’s movement is controlled by a Python script, and Ronan created a website to generate the coordinates of each colored pixel, which the script implemented.