The Slightly-Better Managed Week

Hey all! This week in lab has barely started. I'm blogging early so I can spend more time procrastinating on my research paper rough draft and poster. Whew I cant believe its already that time of year again!

Last week I ran one more PCR on my DNA samples to see if I could get them to work. This time Matt fiddled with the protocol a little bit, making the temperature changes' duration longer. We were hoping to get some better results this time.
Instead the results we got were strange and conflicting. The universal primer Matt gave me amplified all four of my samples but the widow primers I used worked less then 50% of the time. The strangest result was that none of the widow spider primers amplified the known widow spider web DNA (called +C in this experiment). Unfortunately the sample size I'm using is too small and does not allow for any real statistical analysis. I'm not really sure where to go from here.