It just keeps getting better!

It's me, Clover, back from the trenches! Today we had a jam packed day full of verificational experiments and great information about what my colleagues are doing in their work. Plus, I got to eat boudin, a type of sausage that if you knew what was in it you would look at me like I was crazy, with potato puree for lunch. Delicious and nutritious, my friends.

Anyway, the day started off well. We had recieved many positive signals that our bacteria carried the PKK plasmid (or GFP plasmid, as I've called it up until now) and the strawberry genome, but what we did this morning was the real verification on whether or not it had really worked. We first took our purified plasmids that me and Charles had done the Friday before and run them through PCR, where it would amplify and make many copies of the Dna. This would in turn make the gel that we would do next easier to see. What we did for the PCR was put some oligonucleotides, some strawberry and some GFP that would indicate whether or not the plasmid inside contained the strawberry genome. We made two mixes, one with the GFP indicator, and one with the strawberry indicator. We then put our plasmids into the two mixes and put them onto a gel. What we saw was that the mix with the oligonucleotides for the strawberry genome had worked and had traveled down to exactly the length that we had predicted, whereas the plasmid mixed with the GFP oligo hadn't traveled down at all. So, good news all around, I suppose!
After our success in the lab, we had a meeting with Bianca, who had finally come back form her trip. We discussed all of our projects, many of which are quite interesting and that I shall elaborate on once I get more information. Anyway, that was quite fun, and there were these little crunchy and chewy pastries that made the meeting a million times more intersting on top of it. I told them about my progress with my art and the storyboard, and they seemed very intersted and impressed. Bianca even said that Thursday, she would go to this Book Fair where she would speak to an editor about getting my book published. Exciting news for an amateur artist, I can tell you!
After this meeting, we decided that we would put the bacteria into culture again because I think we may be changing the promoter seaquence in the bacteria, just so we can play around with them a bit more. I'll elaborate on that at the end of the week! Anyway, happy and satisfied, I'm signing out!
Clover