Research Blogpost #2

Research Update Blogpost #2

By Marisa Kemper of the Unstoppable Force known as ZAME

So here we are at the second installment of what's going on with our research project. So far the major challenge in our group has been assessing bands. We chose not to use a picture of the gels and instead tried to measure directly from the gel. This has proved difficult because of two reasons. Firstly the gels fade over time, so a band that was bright and vibrant and easy to measure is faded a few days later and almost gone a week later. Secondly, there are a LOT of bands to measure. We are choosing to identify and measure bands on both gels, and collect 2-3 measurements for each band. This is because we want multiple measurements for each band so that we can get an average for how far the band travelled. So we want 2-3 people's measurements for each gel. It's two people sometimes because only two of us can see the band in question. If it was ever just one person who could identify a band we threw it out because we couldn't feel confident in just one measurement.

My question for other groups is, how did you collect data quickly but accurately?

My answer for another group's question is directed toward Tran's group: They ask "Have you weighed out your sample and compare[d] that along with your experiment result?"

We did discuss this and came to the conclusion that because we were not testing amount of muscle proteins or amount of a particular muscle protein, that we will not weigh our samples. Since all we are concerned with is the presence of a particular protein it did not matter to the results how much muscle tissue we used. I will add a side note: weighing would have helped only in the sense that we could have kept the gels more consistent with each other. One gel clearly had more tissue than the other because it had bright bands, thicker bands, more bands, and more smeared bands.

Some things that we plan on discussing in our error analysis is the fact that mussel was missing in the second experiment so the lane results are not as confident since we only have one lane to use with no comparison. We will also discuss something that I just mentioned which was inconsistent muscle mass used and how bands have faded over time.