Sample information

This pillbug was found near another pillbug; the second pillbug was not large enough for our experiment. The day started cloudy, and it got warmer around the time we collected the arthropods.

Methods

We ran a Gel Electrophoresis. However, while prepping, there may have been issues with our DNA extraction or our PCR (more likely due to our blast results). Our ladder also did not show up on the gel. We believe we should have run the gel for longer for more concrete results.
Well 1: Ladder
Well 2: Sample #16 
Well 3: Sample #27
Well 4: Sample #29 (This entry)
Well 5: Positive Control
Well 6: Negative Control
Well 7: +DNA
Well 8: Water

Analysis:
Our gel had very inconclusive results because we had the same band show up for all 3 of our samples and our positive and negative controls. So we believed that the band would confirm that all of our samples were arthropods. However, since we had a duplex reaction, maybe if we had run the gel a little longer, we would have seen a second band that would tell us if any of the samples had Wolbachia, as the positive control should have had a second band, since we cannot confirm that our gel results are unreliable. Moreover, we had an anomaly in our second sample (#27), as it had a very dark band right before the band that all 5 wells had. We are still unsure what this particular band implies.

Results

Our confidence level is very low because our gel results were very inconclusive. First of all, we had no ladder to compare the run of our samples to, so we had no idea how many base pairs the samples stopped at. Moreover, we were expecting two bands on the positive control, one for arthropod and one for Wolbachia, but all 3 of our samples and the positive and negative control had only one band. We expect that this occurred because we did not let the gel run for long enough for the second band to appear. However, we predicted that the one band that did show up for all 5 of the lanes (3 samples and 2 controls) confirmed that all of them were arthropods. Moreover, Sample 2 also had an anomaly; it had a very dark band before the common band that was predicted to be the arthropod confirmation. We are still unaware of the reason for that band’s existence.