Research Project Blog Post 2

Blog Post #2: Reflection/Discussion

My group's data seems to support our hypothesis that similar organs share more proteomic similarities than structures within the same organism. Our gels showed that similar structures shared more bands (and thus greater proteomic similarities) than structures within the same organism. In other words, the heart, breast, and foot of a chicken were more similar to corresponding parts in a turkey than the parts themselves were similar to each other. I know multiple other groups experimented with a similar concept. Therefore, I would be interested in knowing if the trend my group found was present in comparisons with different organisms. Also, are these results consistent with organisms that are not as closely related?

Some advice that I would give to other groups would be to make sure to consider all factors when preparing their samples. The mass of muscle tissue that we collected for each sample was not relevant to the results we were measuring (number of similar bands). Nonetheless, collecting different masses of samples made it so that for our first gel had too much of some proteins. This blurred a few of our bands and made them difficult to compare with other samples. To rectify this, we altered how much of each sample we collected for the second gel. Nonetheless, anticipating and preparing for this factor would have been beneficial. Thus I would suggest other groups consider factors even if they do not directly pertain to their experiment.