User:Anthony Salvagno/Notebook/Research/2010/05/21/The End of a Kickass Week of Science

I'm redoing the experiments from yesterday.

Results
One sample was way too bright and the other had QDs but I couldn't tell which one I had the DNA in. Also the QDs deactivated after a little time. Weird. I got a cool movie though. I'm doing another sample where both chambers are diluted 1:10 what they were in the previous experiment.

In this second experiment, I saw the QDs with and without DNA. Without DNA was way brighter and clumpy. With DNA there were only clumps in certain areas and by eye it looked like the clumps had a specific shape leading me to believe the DNA was attached to those clumps and had bound more than one QD. Conclusions below.

Based on the results of this second experiment I can conclude the following:
 * The sample that I could see the QDs was the one with the DNA
 * The QDs need to be diluted at least to 4nM
 * The QDs in the lambda DNA (1st experiment) was clumpy only in certain areas and not so much otherwise leading me to believe that the DNA was bound to those clumps.
 * The same goes for experiment 2 and the picture above.

Comments
I want to figure out some way to do a DNA comb with QDs attached. That should be perfect for this experiment. I think I could just flow my samples in and let it dry out. The moving meniscus would stretch the DNA on the surface. Similar to how they do it currently.