The Final Tests

Welcome back everyone! This week is my second to last one at my internship and was primarily dedicated to getting ready to present about my project, but before I could do that, I had to do one last PCR.

This was to demonstrate the difference in the amount of DNA produced to the amount of pfu used

This PCR was also finally able to settle that adding BSA to the PCR solution does not change the amount of DNA produced.

There is barely any difference between these two.

It is unfortunate that it does not increase efficiency, but the simpler it is to run the better.

The rest of my time was spent working on my presentation and creating a PowerPoint detailing my project to help me better explain what I did. Hopefully, I have done a good job with that in this blog so far, so it should not be that hard to finish my presentation up. In other news, I found out exactly how much money I saved the lab by creating this pfu. But before I was able to calculate that, I had to find out just how much pfu I made (I know that I made 24mL, but how concentrated is that 24mL). By comparing my pfu's effectiveness side-by-side with taq, I was able to determine that .25μL of pfu was about .125μL of taq. 0.125μL of taq is .625 units according to the manufacturer. Now you may be thinking what exactly a unit is, and that is where a slight problem comes up. Each manufacturer classifies units a different way, but for the sake of convenience, I will just use this taq for my unit comparison. Since I used .625 units of taq, and my pfu produced pretty much the same amount, then it is safe to say that I used was about .625 units of pfu. This would mean that my pfu has 2.5 units/μL. And this is where it gets a little sketchy, I need to compare my pfu with a store bought equivalent, which my lab unfortunately does not have. So, I ended it up just comparing my pfu to another pfu product I found online, which means the money that I saved may not be perfectly accurate. Enough beating around the bush, I found that a total of 96,000 reactions could be performed with my pfu. When compared to a store bought pfu, it was $133 for 160 reactions. This means that I made $79,800 worth of pfu by only spending like $300. That is a lot of money! Too bad I can't sell it and make a fortune; still needs to be regulated and requires much more thorough inspection. I think it is safe to say that this project was a success! Next week will be my final post, so stay tuned!