Week 1- Extractions

I started on the Tuesday of this week working with Suzanne Delorenzo. This is my second year working witha CMOP graduate student and I am really excited to be back. I am continuing my work  in Brad Tebo and Peter Zuber's lab. This week I extracted DNA from samples that Suzanne had collected during May of this year and set up the Stable Isotope Probing (SIP) using an aerchea called halobacterium. we used both 12 C halobacterium and 13 C halobacterium.  Different organisms take in different carbon substrates and when spun at 72,000 rpm for 24 hours create bands where the organisms sit. This allows us to pull our the organisms that we are interested in looking at.  Next week we will be culturing polaribacter on LB ampicillin X-gal plates.  So this week I made these plates with the help of Pete Kahn's intern, Matt. We ran PCR on the 12 and 13 carbon bands that we removed from the SIP. We were able to amplify the DNA from these bands in triplicates and then combine and clean this product. We took this cleaned PCR product and inserted our DNA into the as a plasmid into an ecoli bacteria for growth.  We then sent our vectors to the primate center for cloning.
This week has been busy but I hit the ground running and really started working hard. I had to remember or learn where thing were in the lab but since I had already worked at CMOP, I was able to complete tasks that Suzanne gave me to do the first week. Next week will be more of the things I did this last week.