Electrophoresis!!!

Hey look its Sidney and I using the rather large pipets used in creating this gel electrophoresis lab! Freeze! Nobody move!!

This little contraption to your right is the gel rig where the gel slab sits during the experiment.

Here is a picture of a gel slab in the making!!!

In this Gel Electrophoresis lab I learned many new lab techniques throughout this rather intersting process. The overall point of this lab was to insert different colored dyes into the gel slab and then rn electrical currents through them to see how and what type of change the dyes would go through. The first step in this lab was to make one of the get slabs that had to set and rest for around twenty minutes. To create the gel slab you needed to make a mold using the intersecter things to create the rectangular shapes where the dyes would be placed. Then you filled the tray up with melted gel liquid being sure it is as even as possible all the way across. After the gel has set we placed it in a holder for lack of a better word. From there Mr. Ludwig taught us how to use the pipets and the dyes that we would be injecting into the gel slab. With each new dye the pipet nozzle had to be changed to avoid contamination. Our groups then began this process of adding dyes to each tiny individual slot. This part was a little challenging because of how small the squares were. After the slots had all been filled we added the electrical current to the experiment and let it sit. By the time we came back to school the next day all the negative dyes had moved in the direction of the positive dyes, whereas the single positive dye moved towards the negative side. Each of the different dyes seemed to travel different distances across the gel slab, depending on how the dye was changed. Overall this process was very fun and intriguing and contributed to my understanding of Gel Electrophoresis and how it is used in DNA sequencing.