Week 7

                This week was spent primarily on troubleshooting. We performed several transfections this week, using various plasmids. Once again, we used uncut DNA and DNA cut with the restriction enzyme ApaLI. We also used a positive control using the plasmid mCherry, which is has a high transfection efficiency due to its small size. The bright red color of mCherry also makes it much easier to detect than the YFP that we are using. The point of the positive control is to make sure that the transfection is working as effectively as it should.

                There was extremely high transfection efficiency with the mCherry positive control, exactly what we expected. The transfection efficiency of the uncut and cut DNA was also higher than previous times, leading us to believe that the problems we had with our transfections last week (virtually 0% transfection efficiency) were a single time occurrence and not a problem with the machine. We will start selecting the uncut and cut DNA transfections this upcoming week, as the transfection was so effective.