Week 13 (12/5/22 – 12/9/22): Preparation for One More Trial

This week, since we only have one week left of school until the semester ends, we are in the wrap up phase to where we have discovered that we can do one more transformation run. This will be our last chance of the year to see if we can attempt transformation without contaminating any of our items, as this seems to me the most prominent issue that we have had throughout the semester.

Now, what was interesting was that we decided to do gram stains of all of the bacteria that we used for a transformation that was immediately taken out of the shaking incubator on day two of transformation, right before we plated them. We actually thought that we would find contamination in at least one of these tubes, but alas, every single one of them was a perfect gramstain of just the bacteria we needed.


Because of this, and because the gram stains of all of our competent cells from freeze back where sterile, we could only then conclude that contamination occurred on transformation day itself, which could mean that it happened when doing the plating or when attempting to transform on day one and mixing the competent cells with the plasmid. 

We had originally planned to run transformation this week, but due to time, we have decided to run it next week. This time, for every piece that we can, we will be working completely under the hood. Along with this, we went ahead and autoclaved our TGY in the test tubes, this way the first time that we open the test tubes and use it will be with absolutely sterile media. Hopefully next week, we can figure out how to run the transformation process without contaminating anything!

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