Research Project Blog #2

So far our project has been going more or less smoothly and according to plan. We did have one mishap with the second gel we ran where we didn't have access to one type of muscle tissue from an organism which we had for the first gel. So, our second gel has a missing lane. Also, something interesting happened where our first and second gel lanes ended up being differing levels of light and dark. Our first gel's lanes came out a little lighter than our second gel's did. We speculated that perhaps what happened was that more muscle proteins got dissolved into the Laemmli sample buffer during our second gel run than did during our first gel run. 

It would be interesting to know if anyone else had similar problems because it has caused us a little bit of grief during our analysis. Our analysis is also a little frustrating because of how faint the bands can be in general. I want to know how you guys have been deciding what counts as a band and what doesn't. We have been making the decision based on if the band is dark enough to see without unreasonable strain of the eyes, and also if there is a sharp enough line contrast between the background of the light box and the band itself. We decided to not count bands if they were too blurry to measure with millimeter accuracy, but we realize this is relative to each of our own eyes.