Week 9 – Final Product Drafting and Creating an Experiment
Hello everyone,
This week, my mentor was gone Monday-Wednesday, but I was able to get work done on my final product and make an experiment procedure. For my final product, I have decided to make a scientific poster.
The first thing I started with was a template for the poster on powerpoint. As shown in Figure 1, I organized the poster by abstract, introduction, methods, results, conclusion, references, and acknowledgements, similar to how I will present my project to the school.
As for the PCR experiment, I designed an experiment to PCR 17 different groups (1-16 of my mutated gene+vector and one negative control). The goal of this experiment is to test if my gene insert was put in the correct orientation by using a primer from the vector and a primer from the insert (my first blog post discusses how a PCR process works). If the insert is facing the wrong direction, then the primers will be unable to form a strand to amplify, both of them facing in the same direction rather than forming a strand between them. This will then show up on a gel digest as either incorrect orientation (no DNA visible on digest) or correct orientation (amplified strand of insert+some vector).
As this project comes to a close, I have decided to continue my work at the lab after this 10 week program to finish my work on the Cxcr3delC mutant (otherwise it will be thrown out). As a result, my final product in the next two weeks will be composed of information that I learned from the independent research process, the work I was able to get done with bioinformatics+labwork, and my future plans for the lab work.
Thank you for reading my blog post and feel free to comment!