Lab Photos

I've been taking a lot of photographs in lab to post on Tumblr, as a quick way to share my work in the lab. Here is a recent collection of my favorites.

My bacteria have a habit of spelling out scientific messages, but this time they took it to a new level!

A plasmid DNA resuspension. Black permanent marker outlines the pelleted DNA from an ethanol precipitation at the bottom of three tubes, a trick I’ve started to use in order to aid the resuspension of DNA into a smaller, more concentrated volume. The outline allows me to precisely add a very small amount of buffer to the pelleted DNA, as it sits taped at an angle to a pipet tip box.

After completing a set of inducible expression plasmids which I transformed cultures of diatoms with this past week, it was time to throw out several months worth of agar plates. These agar plates were home to different lines of E. coli which I used to clone different parts of my plasmids. Now that I have glycerol stocks of these E. coli lines (frozen stocks of bacteria cultures stored at -80°C), I was able to clean out my bin of agar plates. Not only did it feel good to get rid of so many plates, but this is an exciting stage in my project as it starts in a new direction.

Genetically transformed diatoms scatter the surface of a selective agar plate. The agar plate, specially formulated to support the growth of the microscopic algae, is made with the antibiotic ClonNAT which is strong enough to prevent the growth of diatoms without a resistance plasmid. The genetic transformation was a co-transformation of a pair of plasmids: the inducible expression plasmid which we will use for genetic regulation tests, and a resistance plasmid for ClonNAT resistance.

This is a new “invention” I came up with the other day in lab: a simple pen/marker holder. While it’s only big enough for 2-3 markers, it’s perfect for our lab benches because our permanent markers wander off. This way our markers stay put on one side of the lab bench. I used clean (but previously used) 50mL conical tubes with a bit of lab tape.