Continuing lab work!

I sure miss my 7th graders! (And my family, just in case you're reading this.) Tuesdays in Fort Collins, CO are a lot more quiet than Tuesdays at Brody.

Anyway, Jenny and I showed up in the morning and the blood was gone!  Well, not really but the tubes were now mostly clear since the proteins were broken down.  Now the DNA was floating free from the cells but we first needed to get rid of the proteins.  To do this we added a precipitation solution that caused the proteins to settle to the bottom of the tube after we mixed it up (vortexing) and spun it back down (centrifuging).  The vortex has the purple lid and the centrifuge has a gray lid:

Since the proteins are now at the bottom of the tubes we needed to draw off the liquid which contains the DNA.  This required much pipetting to transfer the liquid to a new tube without touching the proteins at the bottom!  These are pipettes (or pipettors, depending on who you are talking to) and they are used to transfer an accurate amount of a liquid from one place to another.  Because you don't want to cross contaminate your different solutions (and mix up the DNA from one individual with another) you have to change tips (the yellow things) every time!

 

This row of machines are different thermal cyclers that all do the same thing - they replicate the part of the DNA that we're interested in through a process called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).  It's interesting because you put in your samples primers that an enzyme reacts with to copy the part you are interested in many, many, MANY times and the machine heats the sample up to certain temperatures that allow this reaction to take place.

Now that we had the parts of the DNA we were interested in looking at amplified enough that we can actually see them, we now needed to sequence the DNA.  This allowed us to determine the alleles at each of nine microsatellite loci.  Microsatellites are repeating portions of the DNA that you can use as molecular markers to examine genetic information individuals got from their mom and from their dad.  That way I can look and see if an adult male bird is actually the parent of all the chicks in its brood, or if an adult female had multiple fathers of the chicks in her brood.  This is what sequencing looks like using capillary electrophoresis and displayed on a computer monitor:

 

And that was the end result!  Now I need to look at each individual and compare adults and chicks, and maybe figure out who the missing parent is.  Here are a couple of other photos of things in the lab like my lab bench:

 

This sweet little machine is able to tell the concentration of DNA in the samples from a teeny, tiny drop!

This innocent-looking pig is actually a SPEAKER and he helped Jenny and I stay sane through the countless hours of moving liquids back and forth from one tube to another.  The Christmas music that blared from his belly helped get us in the holiday spirit as well.