Run to red.

Twenty more minutes. Sometimes waiting can be a pain in the butt.
This summer the grad student is trying to wrap up some stuff for our grant renewal. The senior student who just graduated is pretty much gone for good. He said he'd be here over the summer, but we're not holding our breath. *shrug*

But there's a bit of a snag. The grad student ran a DGGE gel using PCR product from a new DNA extraction method. And came up nothin'. Nada. Zip. Zilch. That's a frustrating 2-day annoyance if you ask me. To be fair, he would have run an agarose gel prior to make sure he had something...but was a bit rushed, and since we've ran so many of these DGGE gels before....

But to get nothing? He thinks it's the extraction procedure...left over lysozyme in the extraction could be screwing with the PCR. I pulled out my samples that I had from the same technique, and I'm running that on a quick owl gel to figure out if it was just terrible luck, or what.

And it looks like I need to run a bunch more DGGE gels after we iron out this issue. Which is fine, I guess. As summer wears on, it'll get hotter and being in an air conditioned molecular lab might be ok. Right now I'm still somewhat content to be lazying about reading a book outside, but when stuff comes up that doesn't make sense....suddenly the challenge makes it worthwhile to put in the extra time.

15 more minutes and counting....I wonder, I wonder...