At MSC -- Labs and pods

For the second half of my MSC posts, I will describe some of what Carlos and I did in the labs (and pods) last week.  We are extracting DNA from leaf tissue samples that we collected from the field (and preserved in little baggies with silica gel to dry them out).  A little chunk of each leaf is placed into a well of a 96-sample plate.  From there, we need to break up the leaf tissue to get the DNA out.

First, we centrifuged the plates, which means that all of the dry leaf material gets flung into the bottom of the wells.  We add small silica beads to each well (these will grind up the leaf material when the plates are shaken up).

Next is the fun part -- liquid nitrogen!  We fill a little bucket with liquid nitrogen (while wearing protective gear of course) and immerse the plates in the liquid nitrogen so that the leaf material gets nice and frozen.  This will help the material get ground up really well when we put them in the TissueLyser (AKA the super-fast shaking machine).

The plates are shaken up really well two or three times, then centrifuged again so that all of the material is in the bottom of the wells.  From here we need to add some chemicals that will break down the cell walls of the leaf material so that we can extract DNA.

We add lysis buffer (a really nasty chemical that will dissolve your skin and never heal if it gets on you -- be careful!) and there is even a really cool robot that can pipette your substances for you.

After adding all of our ingredients, the samples need to incubate in a little heater overnight -- then you are ready to do PCR (polymerase chain reaction) -- which amplifies the amount of DNA we will have so that we can obtain lots of barcodes and identify plant and animal material!

After labwork, it is fun to wander around MSC, especially poking around in the pods.  We visited Pod 2 again and looked around the mammal specimens.  We even found a random nose in a bag (it belongs to a fur seal).

Bye bye Puma -- we will be back next week!