Playing with DNA

I had my first really successful day in the molecular lab yesterday.

This is a gel from a PCR reaction of beta fibrinogen intron 7 for eight cockatoo species.

While I promise not to show many more of these (it gets boring pretty quick), it’s exciting because everything worked. Lanes 1-8 have a single band, which shows that I successfully amplified the gene I’m interested in. Lane 9 is a negative control. It’s empty as it should be, showing that I didn’t have DNA contamination in the reaction. Lane 10 is a ladder. It has known sizes of DNA so that one can judge what size fragment the PCR reaction returned.

Now I just have to figure out how to sequence DNA…