WISE journal entry #18

Name: Leah Gerald

Entry: #18 (4/24/2012)

WISE Week:9

Written on Date:5/6/2012

Mentor: Sagar

today my mentor was planning on performing a transduction, but unfortunately we never got to it. a transduction and a transfection have basically the same results, but the processes and results differ slightly. with a transfection, the process is quick and the results also do not last forever, because we add simply add plasmids to the cells that we wish to see the replication in, whereas in a transduction, the results are permanent because it takes much longer, and also because we must add virus to "infect" the cells with the plasmids so that it will permanently change the DNA of the cells and their future lines. to start this process, the first thing we needed to do was a mini prep, which is basically the process in which we isolate the plasmids (DNA) from the bacteria. unfortunately, something got in the way this day, and it was more important that some cells get replated, so instead of doing all of this, we talked about it, and I replated a set of lung cancer cells that had become too confluent.