Research Status
As I mentioned in the chalktalk, my primary goal for this summer is to create a mutant Ncd motor protein by mutating one single amino acid residue. As of right now, I have not been able to obtain this mutant motor protein, which constitutes the primary step of my project. At the beginning of June it seemed like everything is going very well. All of my PCR products gave accurate bands and good yields. I was able to obtain correct overlapping fragments with decent concentration. After ligated the overlapped PCR fragment (mutated DNA) into the vector, I conducted transformation. I miniprep my culture samples and the DNA turned out to be incorrect. I have repeated these procedures for numerous times, about 7 times actually, but none of the result turned out as expected. I have tried two different vectors, PMW and BS, and I’ll continue to try in the next couple weeks. After repeating the experiment for so many times, I used up all my mutated DNA. So I have to start over from the very beginning by running PCRs.