( Part 1, Part 2 )
... and considering all the things that have happened recently * I have not written anything about the great scientific achievements that kept me busy, also known as "At worst, I can always do a fishmonger."
And here's what happened. Nell'uggiosa morning 22 December (pregnant, among other events of many others much more beautiful and sensational, but outside the object of this post) I finally made the acquaintance of my fish-for friends, Alien: a thing of ten cm, from the look grim, staining dark spots and long dorsal and anal fin rays, rays that a painstaking and accurate count under a magnifying glass held to 50 first, 30 seconds. At the same time we also took other references morphometric (parolona!!) Type various lengths (head to tail, eye-operculum, eye diameter, and so on). Eventually the "corpus delicti" was brought to the headquarters of comparative anatomy and risurgelato , Waiting to go to the molecular analysis itself.
The next appointment was in mid-January (in the meantime a lot of other things happening here more interesting, but see what is written is a pair of parentheses) and from here onwards, after a couple of days to make familiar with the various laboratory equipment (centrifuge and pipettes, agarose gel ... all stuff that I had heard of till you drop in previous years, but I had never seen from the truth) is started the real work.
This real work began with the extraction of DNA from the animal (to be precise, from a piece of fin) through enzymatic reaction (protease K), which, after several washes in ethanol, gave me back a test tube full of water and fish nucleic acids. At this point I began PCR. I've done many. But many. But really a lot. So many that late every night I dreamed that I chased Eppendorf vials.
, however, survived this too, we managed to get decent amplification of a region of cytochrome b of our Alien ( primer H15913, as if anybody cares). From this, sent in sequence, we managed to finally get a sequence to be inserted in BLAST. We approach the conclusion? The answer (maybe) the next episode!
つづく
* = Recently in the last four months, the sense of time lately (ha-ha!) went to hell ...
