Friday, February 24, 2017

Individual Blog Post #2: Group Project Update

Jennifer Chin
24 Feb. 2017
BIOL&212 AA

     A surprise our group encountered was how similar the octopus protein bands were to the mussel protein bands instead of the similarity between mussel and scallop. A challenge our group encountered were the smearing of the gels and the cutting of our proteins. In both trials, we tried to keep the proteins in similar small-sized cuts, to avoid major smearings. We did not weigh the amount we cut because of time consumption. Another challenge during our second trial we faced was not proportioning the amount of buffer each flip top microtube dispensed. Some flip top microtubes had more buffers than others, causing the tubes with less buffer to be absorbed in the protein, and resulting being unable to transfer the liquids to the screw top microtubes.

     In the group's error analysis, we will discuss the different sizes of the muscle proteins of our samples and how it made smearings in our gel. Also, the amount of buffer used in each test tube during the second trial. The buffer bubbled a lot when pipetting into the flip top microtubes, after resulting at the end of the room temperature incubation, some flip top microtubes did not have any liquids to transfer to the screw top microtubes. We used some extra buffer to get our results, which still weren't the best. Both errors messed up our gels, causing smears. Another error could be the amount of time our Actin and Myosin standards were in the incubation chamber. The standards were not in for five minutes, but instead for three minutes. This could have made our gel from trial 1 lack certain bands to distinguish the actin and myosin for our other proteins.

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