Team:The University of Alberta/26 June 2008

Today
These are not put on the sequencing page since they didnt work and will have to be repeated.
 * Did Colony PCR on Tom's transformants (22, 23, 25, 35 in I0500); ran on a gel - results were sketchy: lots of bands in each lane. We think this might be due to contamination in one of the reagents because the bands seemed to be the same size in all the lanes (its unlikely that each reagent was contaminated independently from the same source).
 * Streaked out the colonies used in the PCR above, just in case.
 * Got more sequencing results back. Tom's didnt work at all - but this was expected because Taq was used instead of BD Buffer (oops!) Winnie's sequencing worked but it didnt match the reference sequences....
 * Transformed B0034, Thiolase, WinterGreen, and pTerR promotor.
 * Set up O/Ns of I0500, Purple Russian Colonies 1 through 5, and RBS+Thiolase for minipreps tomorrow.

Lab Tip of the Day
Results are often meaningless in the absense of controls! When carrying out an experiment, try to include a positive and negative control. This will allow us to interpret our results better, and more importently, let us know if our results are "real"! For example, when running a digestion of Purple Russian in J61003, you should also run some of the uncut PR+J61003 in another lane and some of the pure Purple Russian biobrick in another. This will allow you to easily comfirm that the digestion products are correct/incorrect. Without controls, you really have no way to tell if your results are what you expect them to be, of if they are due to a fluke occurance, contamination, etc. Scientific data that contain no controls is usually unacceptable!