Research Project Individual Blog Post #2

Our Group project was to look for similarities and differences in protein size influenced by environment. Before running our gels we predicted that fish that were able to adapt between salt and freshwater environments would share a large number of similarities to fish who lived solely in fresh and salt water environments. In our initial run of our gel we did not follow procedures closely enough and made a mistake in forgetting to transfer out our buffer into a screw cap tube before beginning the 5 minute incubation in the water bath, because of this we decided we will include our mistake in our error analysis expanding on how we think this could have affected our gels results by causing smeared gels due to an excessive amount of protein and extremely denatured proteins. However after running our gels a second time we were surprised to find that when analyzing our results it showed more differences than similarities between the fish that can live in both salt and freshwater environments than fish that live in a single environment their whole life. Advice I would suggest to other groups would be to all work cooperatively and verify each step preformed with at least one other group member to avoid possible errors.