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. 

Research Project Blog Assignment #2

Challenges:

The largest challenge that we have faced so far is the inconsistency of the gel samples, with the intensity of the lanes varying from sample to sample and run to run. None of our samples ended up with too much protein so as to render the lanes unreadable, however our samples across the two gel runs are not all the same intensity, with some of the bands towards the end of the gels being difficult to see due to faintness. This indicated that an insufficient amount of protein ultimately made it into the gel well, which can most likely be attributed to preparing meat samples that are too small, the fact that we did not centrifuge either of the experiments, or a combination of the two factors. Making sure to weigh the samples beforehand to get the same amount of protein in the lanes across each run would help eliminate the uncertainty about the amount of protein initially introduced into each test tube.

Questions for other groups:

If you centrifuged your samples, did you find that it increased the amount of protein in the gel, and made the lanes easier to read? Or did it result in too much protein, making the bands towards the top of the lanes too blurred to measure with precision? And if you weighed each sample, did you find that each sample of identical weight resulted in identical intensity of electrophoresis bands, or could any variance in intensity be attributed to other factors?

Research Project Blog Assignment #2

Research Project Blog #2 (Individual) by Shane Hall

BIO 212

     In our research experiment, my group studied meat pigmentation and how it affected protein composition when compared to proteins across the same organism (breast and leg) as well as animals suspected to be from a similar clade (turkey, chicken, and duck).  Surprisingly, the results my group obtained from both of our gels suggest that our hypothesis has been rejected in some regard.  Despite this, my group is still analyzing the overall results.  Thus far, it seems as though the proteins from our first gel were quite close in size and structure. 

     On the other hand, the second gel appears to have been skewed by possible error.  Although the direct cause is unknown, my group discussed the possibilities in detail after preparing our second gel and viewing the results.  As such, we have come to the conclusion that the meat was much drier when preparing the second gel which may have been the catalyst for our erroneous results.  I am curious to see how other groups fared with their second gel considering we prepared them utilizing the same meat on that particular day of experimentation.  Moving forward, our group will review the results once more to ensure that we have acquired accurate information pertaining to both of our gels while preparing our findings for the upcoming presentation.   

Research Project Blog Assignment #2

One of the challenges we encounter is both of the gel have different result, our group need to decide which of the gel is more accurate and which gel should we choose. We are really surprises that both of the gel look different, because we run both of the gel the same way. The question is do other groups have the same situation as us, and how do they decide which gel to use.

Research Project Individual Blog Post #2

We expected the fish that live in both salt and fresh water to share the highest number of protein sizes. However, the results show that they have even more differences than between the fish that live exclusively in salt or fresh water. For our error discussion, we will discuss how we forgot to transfer the buffer containing the fish protein from the flip-top tube to the screw-cap tube before incubating it in the warm water bath; the chunk of fish muscle and the buffer were incubated in the warm water bath for 5 minutes inside the flip-top tubes. We though that since the fish muscle was incubated in the buffer, we would end up with too much protein and our gel would be smeared. However, our gel turned out just fine.

Individual Blog 2

Our group chose white and red meats of duck, chicken and turkey to see if there are relationship between red meat protein and white meat proteins. We hypothesized that the protein sequence of red meat across birds should be similar as well as their white meats. After experiment, we could see our red and white meat for each organism seem to have difference. The white meat and red meat across the organisms are quite similar to each other, but not exactly the same. We are still evaluating our data and perhaps we can find something some interesting relationships.

We had quite the challenge when trying to make up a good and testable hypothesis. We went through discussions and ended up having our hypothesis being rejected by the instructor because it is a little vague. But after getting help from instructor and further discussion, we managed to formulate a better hypothesis before the gel lab. There are many errors in the experiment, especially the gel run #2. The main error was that we used meats that were already very dry. They were so dry that they looked like sand.  The procedure used was similar to the procedure used in gel run #1, and as far as we remember, we made no errors in the procedure. The dry meat could have been the reason why our gel #2 only have a few visible bands, unlike the gel from run #1. 

Megan Thees

February 24, 2017

BIOL&212

Research Project Blog Assignment #2

Our project did not turn out as expected. Before much research we decided to test the hypothesis that protein content would vary within the same organism but raised in different environments, farm raised vs free range or wild caught. We predicted that wild caught or free range animals would have more protein content than their farm raised counterparts because they are able to move more freely in their environment. We found research articles that supported this, as seen in Research Project Blog Assignment #1. After running the protein gel electrophoresis we found little to no differences between Factory Farmed Chicken and “Free Range” Chicken, Farm Raised Shrimp and Wild Caught Shrimp, and Farm Raised Milkfish and Wild Caught Milkfish. We had the opportunity to start over and create a new experiment but we decided that that wouldn't be very “sciency” of us. You don’t just throw data away because you didn’t find what you were looking for. So we decided to repeat the same gel to see if maybe we had made a mistake the first go around. No, we pretty much got the same results. We are not letting this get us down! We are going to present on the finding that we have researched on this topic and use our data to summarize other findings. 

  My questions for other groups are: Did your experiment turn out the way you thought it would? If it didn’t, did you redo it or completely start over? If it did turn out the way you expected, did you also discover other interesting findings? If it did not turn out the way you expected were you able to still use your data for other outcomes? My advise for groups that are in a similar situation as my group, is to repeat the same experiment, we are not professional scientists, mistakes could have occurred during the first gel run. I also strongly stand by the idea of not throwing away data just because it did not turn out the way you wanted it to. Use that data to describe other findings or research how other people were able to support your hypothesis. For error analysis, our group will discuss the fact that even though the label from the grocery store says the organism is “wild caught”, it may not be. Or even though the chicken says it is “free-range”, we have found articles that state, just because they are “free-range” does not mean that they are out in an open pasture. Although they are not raised in cages, their space is still very confined with limited ability to actually get outside. 

RESEARCH PROJECT: INDIVIDUAL BLOG POST #2

Our group research project, where we are comparing wild caught and farm raised organisms based on their protein content, didn’t turned out as we expected. Our hypothesis was not supported by the results we got. Our prediction where wild caught organisms would have more proteins than farm-raised organisms because they can move around freely in their environment was declined as well. Although, this project seems to be a failure, we decided to continue the presentation with the data we have for the reason that this is Science and not everything turns out the way it should be. We will be supporting our results with articles and other scientific references for our discussion.

Based on our experience, experimentations does not always give you results that you expect. My question to other groups is: how would you handle a situation where you think you have already failed? Consider that you’ve got everything planned and suddenly, the experiment goes wrong? There are ways to overcome situations like this, errors are part of Science and it is up to you how will you handle the situation.

Research Blog Post #2

The results that we were most surprised about was that the fishes who live in both salt water and fish water were very different compared to each other since we expected these two fishes to have similar proteins. A challenge we had was picking which types of fish to do the experiment because we wanted fishes that fit our criteria. Originally, we wanted to compare two salt water, two fresh water and one that lives in both but we couldn’t find options for these. We decided to one saltwater fish, one freshwater fish and two fishes that live in both.

We didn’t have many errors while carrying out this lab besides the fact that we basically cooked our fish. During our second run, we forgot to transfer just the buffer with the extracted proteins into a screw cap tube and just put the flip cap tubes into the hot bath. We expected the gels to be smeared due to too many proteins in the gel but the gel had the exact same results as our first one.