Late night work at NYCR

Being ever hardworking, we are spending tonight at NYCR getting through some much needed management stuff and blogging. Who said science isn't cool?

BioArt NY - First Meeting

Dan and Nurit from our group went to check out the first meeting of BioArt NY at 11th Street Bar this Tuesday. Much fun and biology was had by all. Stay tuned for further updates as we work with the awesome bio artists in the city!

NYCR DNA extraction night

Cheers!

Thanks to the wonderful people at NYC Resistor, we are now doing our weekly meetings and workshops at their space (almost) every Wednesday. Here's a brief record of what we did for our first night at the space.

The night's event was a straight DNA extraction affair, except that we were doing it using cheek cells from our own body (our previous attempts were done using fruit). The protocol is about the same. While we didn't use household materials in extracting DNA this time (instead we used chemicals that came in fancy looking bottles) the ingredients are more or less the same.

We are using Gatorade, lysis solution (it's just a detergent ingredient-wise), and ice-cold alcohol.

First, we start with Gatorade to wash our mouths for one minute. After that, we spit the contents into plastic tubes and mix it with lysis solution, shaking it throughly. Then we pour cold alcohol into the mix, a highly complex operation that needs all the concentration and control one can muster.

Make sure to pour it down the wall of the tube, so you don't disturb the contents. If you're successful, you'll end up with...

The white stuff in the middle contains DNA from our own cheek cells! Some of us made a small necklace containing our own DNA, which is just plain cool (or crazy).

We were also joined by some wonderful people from the Sciencehouse who came to check out our operation. Hi guys!

Protein purification night at Dan's

Hi everyone.

It's been a while since we've uploaded anything to this blog owing to much changes and projects that we were (and are) working on. We'll be updating the blog shortly with news of what we've been doing all these days, but here's something to tide you guys over.

We held a protein purification workshop a while ago with some of our fellow members. The process itself was a simple exercise using GFP producing plasmid containing E.Coli cells

(prepared before the event itself, since introducing plasmids to E.Coli cells take a while and can't be done in a single night session). Afterward we tried to run the plasmids on gelboxes, one of

our own design and the other one sold commercially.

Here are some of the equipments we used.

While there were a few mistakes during the course of the lab, the purification of the protein itself went along swimmingly. We did have some real issues with running the gelbox though. The trials and tribulations of the commercial and DIY gelbox will be documented at a later date with pictures and possibly a video (when I'm not writing past midnight).