Bio Class 20

Today in class we spent most of our time working on a new lab experiment that involved bacteria. Our goal was to try and get our prokaryote bacteria to glow by immersing them in PGLO. However, we knew that it would be hard to successfully get the PGLO in to the cell because of the cell membrane. Our solution to this problem was to put the bacteria through heat shock in the hopes of opening up a hole in the membrane. Before we could reach this process, we had to set up the different solutions of bacteria and PGLO. Here are the steps we took before the heat shock process:

We had to be very careful when going through these steps to avoid adding excess bacteria to our tubes.

After these steps we were finally able to put the -PGLO tube and the +PGLO tube through heat shock. :

After the 50 seconds were up we had to immediately  place the tube back into the ice bath to keep the DNA from slipping out of the cell.

After heat shock we filled the tubes with LB broth to act as the food for our bacteria and place them into four different Petri dishes with different environments for the bacteria to grow in. 

Our class hypothesis was:

We would check for the results next class.