For those of you who thought this weeks post was going to be about eating jelly you are slightly wrong but for those who thought it is about making jelly you are slightly right. This week has involved co-sedimentations. And co-sedimentations require GELS, the scientific equivalent to jelly, at least according to me.
Co-sedimentation is done to see if the components used in the ATPase assays actually bind. If they don't, well then all that time spent pipetting was a bit of a waste. To do this you mix components used in our ATPase assays, in my case this was Actin, tropomyiosn and troponin. These are all components of the thin filament in muscle and they are responsible for regulation of muscle activity. However, to be able to regulate muscle activity they need to be bound to each other. Samples were prepared containing all three components or containing just one component. After a times incubation the samples were run on a gel. Well first the gel had to be made, so to my headline. See making a gel can be slightly compared to making jelly. When you make a gel you mix different solutions, one making it solidify, just like in jelly, hence my headline. But instead of eating our scientific jelly we put our samples on it and ran electricity through it, which in my view is a lot more fun. And what made it even better is that the results showed there was binding, so a big yay my thumb has not been sacrificed in vain
Until next week
No comments:
Post a Comment