Gel Electrophoresis Lab Report

PCR Forensics using Gel Electrophoresis
INTRODUCTION
In our experiment, we used gel electrophoresis to observe the PCR products of two suspects’ DNA. In our experiment, we were trying to solve the following crime: “A man was assaulted one night when leaving the automated teller machine at his bank. An eyewitness had clearly seen a man fleeing the scene, and almost identified him from pictures of likely suspects. However, the man identified by the eyewitness has a brother who looks very much like him, although they are not twins. The eyewitness could not tell which man he had seen fleeing the crime scene. However, the victim scratched the attacker in self-defense. Forensics experts recovered samples of skin and blood from underneath the

We started our procedure by filling the gel box with 1xtris-borate-EDTA (TBE) buffer until it was level with the gel and barely covered the surface of the gel. Next, we carefully removed the comb out of the gel. We prepared the DNA samples by placing the samples into a centrifuge. Next, we loaded the DNA inside the gel’s wells made by the comb. We recorded the order we were going to put the samples in, then started loading the wells. We were careful to use a different pipet each time we loaded a different DNA sample to avoid contaminating the samples. Finally, we closed the top of the chamber and connected the cords to the power source. We made sure the connectors were on the same channel by placing the red went into the red power supply and the black when into the black power supply. We turned on the machine on high (135 Watts) for 45 minutes. After that we disconnected the cords and removed the lid to be able to carefully get the gel into a staining tray. We put CarolinaBLU stain on the gel and let it set for 20 minutes. Next, we poured out the CarolinaBLU and added distilled water on the gel to rise the dye off the gel. We repeated this process, then added distilled water again and let it sit for 30 minutes. We then poured out the distilled water and was ready to look at our results in the