Week 8 in Ghent: Lab Week!

Hi there! This week felt like a lonnnnggg week packed full of genetics. So this post might be a little too scientific and all about genetics but that's what my week was!

That’s no exaggeration, this is what my schedule looked like this week:

Every morning we had 3 hours of quantitative genetics then in the afternoons I had some fun genetics lab work!

It was really just one long lab spaced out over 4 days and this is the coolest and simplest way I can explain what we did. We did a PCR-RFLP gel electrophoresis experiment which is basically a lot of letters to say that we looked at DNA.

We were given random 4 samples of extracted DNA from shrimp (Artemia aka sea monkeys) that we needed to identify the species. We were given the results of identified species and we had to compare our results to that. To make it sound more fun, I imagined it like a shrimp crime scene where we had to do DNA analysis to see which shrimp was guilty and left their DNA behind at the crime scene.

On Monday, we first photocopied the DNA to make more of it in a fancy PCR machine. Before that, there was a lot of micropipetting of very small quantities of cool-sounding solutions.

On Tuesday, we made a gel and put our DNA in it. We put some electrical current to make the DNA run across the gel then looked at it under a cool UV machine to make sure that our DNA was actually there.

Then on Wednesday, we took our DNA, added scissor enzymes to cut it up then left it again.

On Thursday we ran a gel again and the different-sized bits of DNA made distinguishable bands in our gel that we got to see under our fancy UV machine again.

My group had really good results and we were able to identify 3/4 shrimp “suspects”. Other groups weren’t so lucky and didn’t get any results in their final gel.

I’m writing this blog post while procrastinating writing the long lab report for this so I really wish I could just submit this instead!! Wish me luck!