Foreign Perspectives

On to SDS-PAGE today. That’s another gel but a polyacrimide one this time which means a bit of fume cupboard work. It’s more complicated to assemble this gel as it’s run vertically so there’s a bit of assembly work to be done then you’ve to use two gels, one to actually run the analysis and the other to make sure that all the samples start off at the same time.

Things went rather well and we’d a relatively early finish to the lab work this afternoon. The downside of today is that we finished with nothing actually visible.

The gel was processed in a sandwich to move some of the proteins onto a nitrocellulose membrane with the encouragement of a little electricity yet again. With that done, processing of the gel and the membrane separates with the gel going into a coomassie blue bath to visualise the proteins whilst the membrane is cut in two so that the CD4 and CCR5 sections can be processed separately tomorrow. For today, the gel is washed in the coomassie whilst the membrane is washed in western blot blocking buffer.

The evening lecture on the biology of HIV was fascinating though it would have been better to have it earlier in the day as there was an awful lot to take in at that time of night. The optional lecture on how to write the research plan was useful and fairly short too. Those that didn’t go to it will regret that when the marks come out.