Individual Blog Post #2

Surprises and challenges that our group encountered during the experiment were smearing that occurred in both of our gels. Smearing occurred in our gels because in both trials, we may have cut up the muscle proteins from our six species in different sizes, and many of them were cut large in size. Furthermore, in the second gel, we came across a challenge with transferring the buffer from the fliptop microtubes to the screw top microtubes. There was not enough buffer to transfer in some of the flip top microtubes, which occurred in the tubes that contained muscle protein that was cut up very largely. We added more buffer to these microtubes, but it still may have caused errors in the second gel and may have resulted in the smearing in the gel. Also, a lot of bubbling occurred when transferring the buffer from the flip top to the screw top microtubes, which may have resulted in less buffer settling in the screw top microtube and may have caused smearing in our gel.

Advice and solutions that I would give to other groups is to cut the muscle proteins from the six species in relatively small sizes so that there will be less chance of smearing in the gel. This will also ensure that there is enough buffer to transfer from the flip top to the screw top microtubes because the protein will not be so large as to absorb the buffer, which was assumed to have happened in our experiment. Furthermore, I would advise groups to carefully transfer the buffer from the flip top to the screw top microtubes to reduce bubbling. This will ensure that enough buffer is transferred to the screw to microtubes, and will reduce errors such as smearing in the gels.