PCR continues...

Sadly, after another week of tweaking things in the PCR, I have nothing more to show than I did two weeks ago. As usual, I clocked many hours in the lab, changing something small, running the PCR, running a gel... and getting no results on the gel. Over and over and over and over again.

And so what am I doing next? Well, first I want to check and make sure the primers that I'm using for the PCR are actually working. To do this, I need some sort of control template (or sample) that I can extract the DNA from, then run PCR on with the same primers I've been using. One of guys at UVM suggested using a olive colored fungus that grows on a potato dextrose agar plate if you leave it out for an hour. So, last week I spent a small part of my lab time making more potato dextrose agar (PDA) plates.

Making PDA is actually kind of fun. You take 200 gram of potato (roughly half of a large potato), cut it up, put it in one liter of boiling water, and boil it for 30 minutes. Then you strain the liquid off using cheese cloth (or, in my case, a plastic-y table mat that had small holes- we use them in the sinks in the lab so that if you drop a piece of glassware, it has something to protect it from shattering on the hard sink surface). Then, you add some dextrose and some agar, and you throw it in the autoclave. Mostly, I just find boiling potatoes in the lab kind of amusing.

Anyway, I made the agar, I poured the plates, I left one out for an hour than left it at room temperature to grow olive green fungus. Only, none has grown. So... I'm currently twiddling my thumbs, waiting for fungus to grow.

In the mean time, I swabbed one more sick bat and smeared the swabs onto PDA plates, in hopes that G. destructans would enjoy PDA. The plates are now on my stairs, and I am waiting. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.

I suppose that's all for now. Just sitting around waiting for some fungus to grow...