Some folks headed over to belle isle marsh today in search of sea slugs. I went by later in search of the same slugs…no luck! But I did see a lot of crabs, both of the pincher-y and hermit crab varieties, horseshoe crab molts, one huge adult horseshoe crab, giant bristleworms, and some jellyfish.
Gel from the last saturday class of BIOTECH 101. I need to find a better way to photograph these- in real live the bands are very purple-blue and the gel is transparent. Some people did better at loading than others. The lanes are labeled 1-8 from left to right. You can see in lane 6 that when the tip was jabbed into the gel, the DNA was loaded mostly to one side. Lane 4 had the best delivery, and even in this picture you can see the supercoiled plasmid DNA that runs as a smaller fragment than the nicked or linearized pDNA above it.
Test gel #many. Stained with Carolina Blu. The bands in the upper left (the pale purple-blue bands in the first two lanes) are pGREEN plasmid extracted at BOSSLAB!
Today we wrapped up the Saturday biotech 101 class. For four weeks, five people got together on Saturday and learned some biotech basics- aseptic technique, transformation, high-quality plasmid extraction, and gel electrophoresis. However, I learned from this class that people tend to get busy and want to do things on Saturday (what a concept!), so the next iteration of the class is called BIOCAMP 101- same material, same hands on activity, but over the course of one weekend in June (check the classes page!) instead of spread out over the month.
Unfortunately, it was shipped to us broken, and since it was done on ebay, there are now ebay shenannigains going on. Grr. The part that is currently leaking is the condenser tank. It looks like this:
It may be possible to repair or replace the tank, I just hope there is nothing else that is wrong with it! It would be pretty awesome to have a real automatic autoclave instead of a pressure sterilizer and a turkey burner. The sterilizer and burner will still have things this autoclave doesn’t- like the ability to do 1 L bottles, but it will be a lot more convenient to autoclave things.
Also, the photosynthetic sea slug group is going out to belle isle marsh this SUNDAY to go and find some slugs! Give me a holler (see contact page) or check the diybio-boston mailing list for more details.
