Day 13

November 2, 2011

Today we did really complicated things that I'm not actually sure how to explain. We talked about n/p charges (negative to positive) which was what our experiment concerned. The goal of the experiment was to see an increase of protein. We begun by taking Lucifase Assay Substrate (LAS) and placing 100 microliters in 4 different tubes. Then we took 200 microliters of cell lyate and placed it in a 4x6 plate. Cell lyate were the proteins from the cells. Then we mixed the LAS with the cell lyate. We then placed the tubes into this machine that determined the n/p ratio. Meanwhile, JM used excel to plot the data. The data ranged anywhere in between 5 million and 12 million cells for the different trials. We were looking for an increase of protein as the trials went on. And for once, we got a good result! The number of proteins did end up increasing. Then we repeated all of these steps five times to make sure that we obtained accurate data. Seung Ha and I both got turns doing this process. However, our data wasn't accurate because we produced a few bubbles when we initially pipetted which throw off the results. Then, JM taught us how to plot the data that we received. The process doesn't sound hard, but it was very tedious and took about the whole time.  So this was it for today!