User:Andy Maloney/Notebook/Lab Notebook of Andy Maloney/2009/08/12/Surface passivation trial 2
Trial 2
So nothing seemed to work yesterday. I plan on looking at something that I know will work and then I can determine if the new stuff I am going to do will have the chance of working.
I have no idea why I didn't do this first yesterday. From what everyone is telling me, kinesin and microtubules are labile and can screw up pretty easily. Why I didn't make sure everything was working before I tried something new is beyond me.
Plan
- Make a [math]\displaystyle{ \kappa }[/math]-casein coated slide and make sure everything is working.
- Prepare a lipid slide using what the paper says to use, 1 mg/mL lipid concentration.
First step
The first thing I want to do is make sure I still have microtubules. To do this, I prepared a "motility solution" since I know I will be using kinesin today. The hope is that I can take an image of the microtubules to ensure that I have some to work with today.
I also got a batch of fresh anti-fade for use in the motility solution.
As you can see with the above image, I do have microtubules and they are stuck to the glass.
Second step
The next step is to see if I have active kinesin. To do this I will;
- Prepare a slide coated with [math]\displaystyle{ \kappa }[/math]-casein.
- Flow kinesin in.
- Flow MTs in.
- Observe.
This worked out beautifully. I will post an animated gif once I can do this.
Third step
- Coat a cover slip with 1 mg/mL lipid molecules.
- Hydrate with BRB80 in a flow cell.
- Add kinesin.
- Add MTs.
Well, I forgot to add the anti-fade. Thus, the slide is not viable. It does look like there are globular formations on the slide and I believe this is from the lipids aggregating. One thing to note is that the paper I read indicated that the slides they prepared were under vacuum for 20 hours. I'm not sure this is entirely necessary but it may be the case.
