Pt1420 Unit 2 Lab Report

Discussion

PV92 Gel Electrophoresis Results: Through the usage of gel electrophoresis the correct allele for each sample was able to be determined. Lanes one through three in the gel,were the positive control lanes they contained the PCR cocktail and a known high-quality template for the PCR reaction. First lane contained the sample with the +/+ allele, which had two copies of the ALU repeat allele. The first lane had a band at about 941 base pairs. The second lane in the gel contained the -/- allele and had its band at about 641bp, lower than the +/+ allele in lane 1. Since the +/+ has extra stretches of DNA, it should have a larger mass which makes it progress more slowly through the gel compared to the -/- allele which has less base pairs. The third lane contained the +/- sample, and after running the gel the lane had two different bands. This sample is heterozygous as it contained both alleles and thus had one band at about 941 base pairs and another band at about 641 base pairs. Lane four contained the negative control which only contained the cocktail mixture with water. There was no band present within this lane at it did not have any DNA present. The fifth lane contained student one’s PV92 DNA

The initial gel electrophoresis results had some issues, as they only showed one student’s PV92 segment, while the other lanes that contained students PV92 DNA segments showed no bands. A reason for why this occurred could be due to lack of the students DNA present. The steps in which DNA was gathered had deviations from student to student, as some could not have swish as vigorously or others had food in their mouths which contributed to the size of the saline rinse suspension. No major error was observed throughout the procedure of the experiment, so error most likely came from the gathering of the DNA from the