Week 1 Lab: Pipetting

In the first lab we were oriented into lab work and norms. Got familiar with the concept of pippetting and introduced several different pippettes that will be helpful with transferring different liquid volumes.

Lab 2: Gel Running

Creating the gel: 1 part 50X TAE Electrophoresis 49 part deionized H2O 3g LE Agarose

Pouring the gel into the well-molds:

Designing the gel-run results in the web interface (It’s a space-invader holding a heart!):

Preparing the pcr tubes with restriction enzymes, dna, CutSmart buffer & water:

Incubating the PCR tubes in the Thermocycler:

Injecting restriction enzymes into wells in the gel

Running the gel

Here we are!

Week 3 Lab: Opentron Gel Art

This week’s lab was about getting familiar with cuttind-edge lab automation tools. We were introduced to the Opentron, which to me was a close relative to 3d printing hardware and other gantry based fabrication method. It runs on a python script indicating coordinates for the working head to go-to, and has a pump and a motor where you would imagine the filament extruder motor and the heating element to be in a standard FDM 3d printer. Really enjoyed using this cool device.

Thanks to Ronan Donovan’s awesome online tool, we could bypass the scripting using a simple UI that translated our graphics into the code itself, very similar to what a slicer software does for an STL file to a 3D printer or what a CAM engine does for a STEP file for CNC operations.