Week Six: Gathering data and another PCR

Hello! This week I began focusing more on gathering data from my participants. Due to the APs and lack of responses, I’ve had to decrease the size of my experiment group to around 20 people. One group of 10 is the experimental group, where there is a time constraint (thus putting participants under pressure). The other group of 10 is the control group, where they can finish the exam at their leisure. In the next few weeks I’ll be gathering testing data from all 29 participants. 

The other half of my project isn’t going as planned unfortunately. My amazing lab advisor Madison and I met in the lab on Thursday to retry the PCR with different measurements. Everything was going well until we turned on the thermo cycler machine. In an earlier blog post, I talked about the thermal cycler and how its purpose is to heat and cool the DNA sample in order for the primers to attach to the specific sequence I’m looking at. Basically, it’s a critical process to ensure you get results to show at the end of the PCR. However, when we inserted the samples, the machine decided it wouldn’t work. The machine could barely reach the starting temperature of 97 degrees and kept giving us an error message.

This is Madison and I trying to pray to the thermal cycler for it to work. I’ve told Madison about my blog, so she thought this would be a good moment to capture and rant about. Overall, we ended the lab day without being able to run the PCR, but with a solid new set of measurements for the experiment. Next week will be my reattempt at the PCR and gathering more data!