Spring 2016 Running the Gel

This week in lab I took the DNA I extracted last week and ran a gel electrophoresis gel with it. The protocol I followed was used to extract DNA from black widow webs, and I wanted to be sure that the extraction process worked on other types of spider webs as well, so I ran this gel to prove that I actually had extracted DNA from a variety of webs. This is what the gel looked like:

 And here is the same gel with molecular weights and lane detection added in by the computer the fancy new gel imaging system can do:

So the thing is I put DNA in all but the last three wells but only two lanes are showing up on the lane detector. This means that I probably don't have DNA in those wells and the reasons for this are: not enough supernatant was moved from the extraction tube, or I left the DNA at room temperature too long and the DNA degraded, or I didn't use DNase free micro-centrifuge tubes and the DNA degraded, or I left the gels in the light too long and the syber green dye degraded, or I pipetted the DNA and loading dye wrong and didn't get any in the actual wells, or any number of other things. There doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between the type of spider the web was collected from, or the age of the web, and whether or not DNA was detected. In lane four, or two on the lane detection image, there is a strong clear band at 120bp. This was a web that was collected almost as it was being spun, as the spider was still in the web and construction was not completed yet, which may explain why the band is so clear.