Day 8 - More on chromatography

Today we follow DaWei's friend Fu Jing on her tests. She carefully pipettes minute amounts into a small vial. Then using a centrifuge, she seperates the suspended denatured protein. The appear at the bottom of this machine.

However the interesting part of the machine is that it makes use of the centrifugal force in high speed spinning, this moves the suspended solution to the bottom of the vial. 

Next, Fu Jing uses ( 1-directional ) gel electrophoresis on the the solute which she took and dyes them. This is PAGE (Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis). It eliminates then different charges of the different proteins and actually seperates them through different molecular weight. Smaller ones moves faster, while the bigger one moves faster. Thus you will be able to see different bands on the ladder.

She has to carefully pipette the solute as the ladder is very small, less than 1 cm in width and less than 0.5 mm in thickness

The gel will later be taken out in 1-2 hours time. Then it will be taken out and destained overnight in a box.

The machine controlling the voltage.

Her previous work which had already gone through PAGE.

Current work in progress.....

 Next we followed DaWei.

He took 1 micro litre of enzymes and 20 micro litre of proteins and mixes them together. The enzyme-substrate then converts the long protein chains into two separate proteins, meaning a cleavage was done here. 

Mixtures are then left overnight in a 4 degree Celsius Refrigerator. This is because the proteins are very delicate and could possibly decompose at room temperature if left overnight.