Ahhh I am so happy I could sing, jump, and dance a happy dance!! For the last 3 months of so I've been getting crap crappity crap microscope data.... considering this microscope technique is the main functional analysis I do having crappy data is really depressing because I can't prove ANYTHING without functional analysis.
Functional Analysis = IMPORTANT!!!!
But today... yes today we managed to fix it! AC came into the microscope room with me today and thought the light source seemed rather lack luster and started talking about the light box and whether maybe, just maybe, the globe had gone and no one had noticed.
This jogged my memory as I realised.... well... no that couldn't be the case as we had changed the globe recently... if fact we changed it three months ago. Around the time everything went up shit creek! This made us think at first that the wrong globe had been put in and that the globe just wasn't powerful enough. Quick email to our resident microscope Mr. Fix-it who comes down and has a look at it.
Turns out - when he changed the globe to first time he didn't realise that the main connector from light box to microscope must be a certain length for the maximum amount of light to reach the stage! Ugh!
3 months of useless data... all because some connector was not the right length... am I annoyed? Slightly... but in all honesty I'm more relieved than anything! Finally I'll be able to get some proper results!! YAY!
Also... tested my site direct mutagensis colonies... Actually the first colony I sent away for sequencing ended up only showing parental DNA... :( Luckily RC encouraged me to send off the rest of the colonies for sequencing just in case - and all 5 of them ended up having the mutation I wanted and 4 of them showed extremely strong sequence alignment to the reference sequence! So on to mutation number 2!
Friday, February 1, 2008
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