Snags

So, as of now we haven't gotten very far at all into the cloning process...the first steps of mixing the DNA and plasmid and getting them into the bacteria worked, but only just. When we went to plate our solutions out to pick the white colonies from the blue colonies, we got bad results, which either manifested as a lawn of bacteria, or a small amount of blue and white colonies, in tight, hard-to-work-with groupings. According to Bill, however, everything we were doing seemed right on the money, so he's currently incubating another batch so we can look at them this coming tuesday.

Hopefully, it will give us lots (50+) distinct colonies per plate, and not an unusable lawn or 'hot spots'. Once that is over we can pick and patch and grow each colony properly by itself to isolate the certain DNA sequence.

Presentation

I am surprised, honestly, at how well our section of the Elwha presentation went at the Olympic National Park visitor center. The presentation itself felt way too short and simple compared to everyone else's, but somehow it all came together into a sweet and succinct description of what we had been doing over the past year. Thanks to Jessica, I had someone to play off of and to keep my head on straight throughout the entire presentation, but as soon as we hit the questions, that's when it got easy.

Details were always easier to remember for me than being asked to create my own summary of things...

At any rate, like I said in the presentation, cloning has started. We just mixed the plasmid and the DNA fragments together, then introduced them into the E. Coli cells day before yesterday. Hopefully, by today, we should have some good colonies to pick and patch, and things can go briskly before Bill needs to leave.