GENETICS

Report Instructions Salad BOL I 2016
Report Salad BOL I: Your report should include the following: a) An Abstract of 200 words or less that summarizes the goal/ hypothesis (including intermediate hypothesis if appropriate), methods, results, and implications/conclusions from this study. b) A Results section that includes your data tables transcribed from (not photographed from) your lab notebooks and containing predictions and observations (with table numbers and captions), and a brief written summary highlighting the results that you want the reader to notice – but without interpreting what the results mean. (For this section of Salad BOL the your observations would include your DNA concentration after PCR, your counts of white and blue colonies on the transformation plate, and any other observations that you think shed light on the questions below.labeled gel photo, standard curve, and table of fragment sizes). c) A Discussion section that draws a conclusion regarding the original goal/hypothesisand any intermediate goals/hypotheses, and describes your evidence about whether the goals have been metreasoning from question to results to conclusion. This is where interpretation of the results occurs. In other words, the discussion should be an argument marshalling support for your conclusions (not necessarily for your initial hypothesis) based on the results of the experiment. You may take class results into consideration, and if your own results are contradictory you should describe how they are contradictory and what might have caused the conflicting results. Be more specific than “mistakes were made”. Consider the possibility that mistakes were not made, or were not made by you. Your report is expected to be no more than 4 pages of text.
In preparing this report, consider the following questions:
What plant did you initially attempt to isolate DNA from?
Do you have evidence that your initial isolation of DNA from a plant was successful (or evidence that it was not?) Present the evidence (if any) in the Results, and in the Discussion address the meaning of that evidence, or explain why there is none.
Do you have evidence that the PCR process was successful (or not)? Describe that evidence, or explain why there is none.
Do you have evidence that the ligation of your PCR product into pGEM-T Easy was successful (or that it was not)? Present the evidence (if any) in the Results, and in the Discussion address the meaning of that evidence, or explain why there is none.
Do you have evidence that the transformation of E. coli JM109 with ligated plasmid (either P, or +, or without insert) was successful (or that it was not)? Present the evidence (if any) in the Results, and in the Discussion address the meaning of that evidence, or explain why there is none.
Do you have evidence that cells were transformed with plasmid containing any insert (or that they were not)? Present the evidence (if any) in the Results, and in the Discussion address the meaning of that evidence, or explain why there is none.
Do you have evidence that cells were transformed with plasmid containing your PCR product (or not)? Present the evidence (if any) in the Results, and in the Discussion address the meaning of that evidence, or explain why there is none.
Do you have evidence (1) that you had DNA from the plant at some point, but alsothat (2) you no longer do? If so, discuss this evidence, and consider at what step in the process your DNA was lost. Specifically what might have caused the loss of DNA? If you “borrowed” samples with DNA from others at any point, report that as well.
You do not yet have evidence of the size of the PCR fragment, or any sequence information. Looking ahead to the remainder of this project, at what point will you be able to tell whether the rbcL fragment that you isolated can be used to distinguish your species from your classmates’ species?