I give myself an A for effort!!

I am not usually this terrible at something that I try so hard to accomplish, but I guess when I fail...I fail hard!
Yet again, I have been unsuccessful at isolating DNA from my samples, so I have not had a good gel yet and I still have not run PCR (Grrrrrrrrr!). 

I noticed that last week a few things has gone wrong with my setup during the electrophoresis phase of my experiment.  About 15 minutes after I turned on my power source (to 120 volts), it just turned off, for no apparent reason.  The good thing is that I was there to see it and turned it back on right away.  I wasn't sure if that glitch was going to affect my results but it actually did.  My DNA started to diffuse backwards onto my gel.  I should have learned my lesson that time, but I used the same rig and power source again.  When the same thing happened, I actually stated to get excited.  Maybe this was my problem all along...my power source, not an ID10T error.  So this week, I stated fresh, with a new rig and new power source for my electrophoresis set up.

Yesterday I sat in Anil's class as he taught BIO 160 and ran my entire protocol from start to finish.  I thought that if I was there he would be able to help me along the way (without disrupting his class of course), and maybe just the change in atmosphere would yield better results  :o(

Nada....

I was really starting to get frustrated, especially as the rough draft for my research paper is coming up soon.  I was tired of the weeks of disappointment, so this morning I spoke to Josh and Matt and they made me feel a little bit better about myself and my (lack of ) progress.   This is the first time that anyone here in the STEM program has used this  protocol that I am using to extract human DNA (Gilbert is using the same protocol but on fruits and veggies and the yield of genomic DNA is like 1000 times grater then human), so I guess it is to be expected that I am the trial and error gal for this project.  I also learned that two other STEM students from last semester tried and only one person really got results.  She had a very well established protocol and all of the kinks had already been ironed out for her but even then, she was still only able to produce quality DNA about 70% of the time. So, try again...I will.

“To conquer frustration, one must remain intensely focused on the outcome, not the obstacles.”
― T.F. Hodge