Dear second year students,
The best laid plans of mice and men are oft to go astray...
We had grand plans for the second year, integrating courses together. The mutant plasmid students made in Molecular Biology I, would be used to generate the proteins purified in Protein Chemistry I which in turn would be the proteins analyzed in Biochemical Methods II.
Well it all collapsed at the first hurdle. Mutagenesis reactions which work
98% of the time first time in our group, completely failed in the teaching
labs (except for one group - who are you and what mutant did you get?)
We could generate the mutants ourselves very easily, but I would prefer to have some second year students do the work, if only to prove that PCR reactions are easy to do.
So, what I am looking for is 2 x 2 volunteers to come and do some work in my lab with Kirsi Salo (900 plasmids made in the last 5 years) before Xmas. Each volunteer to do a mutagenesis reaction and select 6 plasmids and all of the mutant plasmids made to go forward to the students on the Protein Chemistry I course. The work would take a couple of hours one afternoon (mutagenesis), followed by a one hour the next morning (DpnI treatment) and a couple of hours that afternoon (transformation), one hour the following afternoon (picking colonies) and then a half-day sometime (doing mini-preps and setting up sequencing) and a couple of hours sometime after (precipitating sequencing reactions and analyzing the results). In all it is about 2 days work spread over a week or so. Timetable at our end is very flexible.
So if you want to do some molecular biology which works and which you will use in two other courses this year, please contact me as soon as possible.
Best wishes,
Lloyd