Bradford Assay

My lab partner, Allison, and I have been assured that troubleshooting is a desired skill and that we will be grateful for our current Proteins woes later in our careers. And I'm proud to say that despite repeated setbacks, we've put our big-girl lab coats on, looked that ?-galactosidase in its ornery eye, and paraphrased the words of the incomparable "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in the best B movie ever, They Live:

"We have come here to chew bubblegum and purify proteins... and we're all outta bubblegum."

A run-down of the problems we've encountered and the ferreted out causes:... Read more

Just kidding. We're too nerdy to be this coordinated. Allison and Holly are just good sports.

Along with the hoodies, jeans and wind-tousled hair, the autumn weather has brought a slew of new classes:

Molecular Biology I:

This past week in Mo Bio we worked on learning to set up restriction digests. While I was initially intimidated by the calculations, I warmed up when I realized how "logic puzzle-esque" it really is. We also whipped some competent Escherichia coli JM109 cells, by taking a sample from a mid-log phase suspension culture, spinning... Read more

Time flies when you're having fun. I am convinced that I had so much fun from the middle of last term to the present that I actually time travelled into the future. OK. Maybe I'm not actually convinced, but I'm highly suspicious.

We have done too much for me to update in detail. So I have decided to bring you up to speed by summing it up and then presenting some photos.

First! I have CONFIRMED my summer term coop work experience will be in the Stedman Lab at PSU !!!! In case you didn't catch the... Read more

Why are Bradford assays like Groundhog Day? You'll have to read about it to know.

Apparently I'm in movie simile mode this week too because this week was like being stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. We started our week with the Bradford assay. I made serial dilutions from our first aliquot. After checking with some other lab groups, we determined that we would have within range results using 1/10, 1/20, 1/30, 1/40, and 1/50 dilutions. Next we mapped out our 96 well plate to run our assay in duplicate. We got a beautiful standard curve with an... Read more

Chicken liver is a great learning tool! This week's adventures in Bioseparations involved homogenizing chopped liver, using it to explore the high speed centrifuge and running our old friend the Bradford Assay on it.

We started by jumping into a mixed day of centrifuge lecture and preparation of homogenization buffer. After we were sufficiently oriented with the rules for using the centrifuge and how to operate it, we were able to spin our chicken liver samples. Once we had a loose pellet, we pipetted off the supernatant, and then spun that down again. We also used different samples to... Read more

Is it science or art? Jennifer tells us about make tubes with lovely colors, better known as Bradford and ss-galactosidase assays, and graphs with Excel. Guest speakers tell the PCC classes about technology transfer at OHSU and cell culture at Najit Technologies.

This week (and a half) in Portland Community College's Bioscience Technology Program we continued work with assays, and had guest speakers in Current Topics and Cell Culture.

Last week in Lab Tech we worked on the Bradford Assay which measures the amount of protein present in a sample. (Somehow I managed to... Read more

Hostess is threatening to take away our Twinkies. Bravely, we forge ahead into the bioscience learning horizon with exciting guest lecturers.

This week at Portland Community College's Bioscience Technology program we were treated to visits from people in our local biotech industry. Our first visit was from Jerry Thomas, PhD , formerly of Molecular Probes/Invitrogen/Life Technologies. Dr. Thomas' lecture was informative, entertaining and friendly. While answering our questions about what he looked for during interviews for potential new hires and entry level technicians, he gave us more insight about exactly what we need to communicate during... Read more