DNA on Speeder Bikes or so I Thought

This week I am working on making more 2% Agarose gels in order to run some with my newly amplified Ant DNA. I ran the PCR last Thursday, and I am hoping for the bands in the gels to be clear. I need the bands to be clear in order to make a concise measurement of whether certain bands are similar to one another.
I ran my gel with the amplified DNA and there were no bands! I then ran another gel with my regular DNA samples and saw polymorphic banding. I wanted to make sure I actually had DNA in my samples and wanted to know why there was no DNA showing in the gels from the PCR. I will be running another gel next week on the same amplified DNA samples. I need to figure this one out.

The Old Republic

This week I began making new gels with 2% Agarose in order to see if the polymorphic bandings from the ants would seem clearer than the bands in a gel of 1% Agarose. It did not seem to work and I am wondering if I should just run another PCR on my ant DNA. I ran three gels with 6 microliters of DNA and 2 microliters of the orange loading dye. It occurred to me, after I reviewed my previous gels over the summer, there was barely enough DNA shown in the first gel from my amplified DNA samples. Here are the first three gels I had ran a couple of weeks ago from the first PCR in a 1% Agarose Gel:

Colony A



 

 Colony B

 

 Colony C

 

In the Colony A gel it shows barely any DNA, and when I ran a gel yesterday with the same DNA, but in a 2% Agarose gel, nothing showed up. I felt as though it was a waste of three 2% Agarose gels.



My poor agarose gels.

Storm Troopers on the Rise

I am happy to be back this Fall 2015 Semester! Good wishes to you all on this new semester! I'd like to share with you all the most interesting thing I have been researching so far about ants. I've been researching their many different adaptations. One of my favorite adaptations of an ant species is how they are capable of stealing another specie’s colony in order to survive. They kill the colony’s queen and all of her children. The tend to leave some of the larva alive in order to keep them as their slaves. This ant species is known as Polyergus breviceps or Slavemaker ants. They are basically ruthless serial killers.

Here’s a video of the ants about to embark into new territory: