Week 16 of 17
MAY 5 TO 10
Fiction. No real student, family or grade appears.
Containment levels and who is responsible when something leaves a lab. The answer is usually a system rather than a person, which is comforting and also how nobody ends up accountable.
Getting bacteria to take up a plasmid, and why only a small fraction do. The selection step is what finds the ones that worked.
The wet lab. Transformation, then a gel to confirm it. My plate had colonies where the control said there should be none, which means contamination somewhere in my technique.
ME
Four courses in and my aseptic technique is still the weakest thing I do.
Mapping the bands against the ladder to work out fragment sizes. My gel was readable despite the plate problem, which is a small mercy.
Protocol, plate results, gel image, and the contamination written into the limitations rather than quietly omitted.