Week 1 Lab: Pipetting

This week we got to spend some time just having fun getting to know the lab space. We made fun petri dish art using colored water, and even got to run some gels (using these fancy machines that dont require any buffers)!

Week 2 Lab: DNA Gel Art

Making the 1X TAE Buffer

Prepping the Gel

Restriction Digest

Running the Gel

Results and Imaging

Discussion

Given that our imaged gel didn’t look like this, we can dive into what might have gone wrong.

Lanes 2 and 3 appear to have no bands at all. One possible explanation is that we accidentally did not add DNA to the digest, or we did not add any of the digest to the mix that went into those lanes. Given the small volhmes we were pipetting, it’s possible that someone made an error by not submerging the tip when loading or dispensing.

Lanes 4 and 5 have smeared bands. This could be caused by a too high DNA concentration in the digests, which would prevent the DNA from moving efficiently through the agarose gel. Maybe the DNA that was meant for lanes 2 and 3 ended up in lanes 4 and 5.

Week 3 Lab: Opentrons Art

This week, we got to utilize an Opentrons liquid handling robot in order to make cool gel artwork!

The custom python script tells the Opentrons unit to pick up a pipette tip, when and where to aspirate and dispense, when to switch tips, and when to stop.