13 September 2024
By: Arya Haala and Elenore Milde
We are officially back on campus to continue research! Lab started this fall by reviewing our progress from the Spring semester. We identified where we left off and what to work on next. We also got a great refresher on the lab notebook procedure!
After this, we continued to review by doing pipetting practice and PCR practice. We completed the PCR’s using our selected primers to ensure they still work properly and to review our skills. Unfortunately, after running a gel and analyzing it, we saw flaws in our results. There was some contamination in all our samples, so we needed to redo the PCR and gel to double-check our primers.
The newest thing we have done this semester is cDNA synthesis. This was a continuation of the RNA isolation we did last Spring. We took our RNA and converted it into cDNA making it more stable and easier to work with. We completed this protocol on six animal samples. These samples will be shared within the Brain and Behaviors Stream between all groups to create a bigger sample size.
To finish out the beginning of the semester, we completed PCR protocols on each of our six cDNA samples using beta-actin for our primer. In the coming weeks, we will run a gel using our cDNA PCRs to ensure the cDNA is of good quality before continuing into qPCR to quantify our gene expression within the samples.
