At the beginning, we had difficulty in creating the hypothesis since we could not find enough traits to build the phylogenetic tree. After doing the experiment, the results came out were very surprising to us. We expected that salmon would only have a few muscle proteins in common with the other five species since it was hypothesized as the outgroup. However, it turned out that all the samples yielded a very similar number of bands with the same distance traveled from the wells. What surprised us was that salmon even shared more common proteins with a chicken or a deer than did it with another fish like skate or trout.
In the error analysis section, we could discuss about the faulty pipetting method which might have cross contaminated the samples, resulting in the unexpected similarities in muscle proteins of six vertebrates. Also, in the first trial, we did not measure the dimensions of muscle tissues cut out which caused some bands on the gel to smear due to oversized samples. However, in the second trial, we made the sample sizes too small, leading to another problem: some bands appeared too faint that we could barely see them. If we could do this experiment for at least one more time, the results would be much better since we know where the problems are. Overall, the results revealed quite interesting data that we could use to determine the relationships among the six animals we tested and reconstruct our phylogenetic tree.
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