Honors Introduction to Molecular Biology & Biochemistry Research
694:315 Fall 2006

Lab Notebooks - Due in Lab #10

Notebooks and the Clone Management Log Sheet listing your results on the analysis of your clones is due this week.  Both will be reviewed in class by your professor.  A description of what is expected to be in your notebook was written in the Introductory lecture notes that was handed out to you.  

The notebook is the key to good experimental practice.  It should be a complete record of your experiments as they are actually performed.  A good notebook will enable you to reconstruct, long after the fact, exactly what you did and why.  The notebook that you will keep for this course is to be distinguished from the usual “write-up” required in most laboratory courses because it will contain the record of the experiments only. 

In the notebook you should have written down what was actually done.  Note that what is actually done may sometimes differ significantly from what you planned to do (i.e. if you added 10 ul instead of one 1 ul or if the tube dropped and you lost half the sample.).  These variations may significantly effect the results of the experiment and therefore you should have a proper record of what was done to reconstruct the experiment.  There is no need to copy the protocols.  You should have just indicated on the provided protocol sheets where there were changes.  

If you took notes or calculations on other pieces of paper these should have been added to your lab notebook as additional pages or taped to the back of the pages. 

Data:  All of your data and your interpretation of the results should be included in the notebook.  Since most of your data is in the form of your agarose gel pictures, these should all be taped into your notebook and include labels of each lane.  The interpretation of your results for every clone should be include:

Was there DNA in your prep?
Did you digests and PCR  work?   If not, what was the most likely reason? (No sites, forgot to add enzyme, etc)
What is the size of the insert as calculated by the PvuII digestion?
Does the size of the PCR fragment support this model?
Is there a PvuII site in your insert?
Should you sequence this clone? 

Included in your notebook should be the Clone Management Log Sheet on the clones you have purified, sequenced and analyzed, along with the identification of the gene or its homologs that you have been able to analyze so far.  At this point you should have completed the analysis of the first two clones that you have sequenced.