insert intriguing title here

Uh, so, week two... More squishing aphids, more PCR, more gels. Next week I'll be doing something new though. I'm going to be trying a different type of gel, and the process is called DGGE. It involves a polyacrylamide gel that has a gradient of denaturing agent in it, because when you do the PCR, you use these special kind of primers called clamp primers that hold the DNA together at the specific gene of interest, or something to that effect. The grad student I'm working with isn't really that familiar with it and I'm even less so, so I guess we'll both be figuring it out a little more once the time comes to try it out. It's supposed to be really good at seperating bands that are only a few base pairs different. Anyway, I could probably also do a better job of explaining if it wasn't so late, but I kind of wanted to troll for more votes for the duct tape thing while I'm at it... because it's ridiculous how far behind I am now. So yeah, some more votes would be nice...