Gloves

Well, we are having sequencing problems again. Very frustrating. The outcome looked a lot like the problems we were having earlier this year, using old (about a year old) BigDyes. I bought more in early March, and everything went great for a while.

Then the past 2-3 plates were bad again. Kelly and I did some sleuthing today and traced all the problems back to any sequencing that happened after April 27, 2011. On that day I sent a message out to the lab noticing that the autoclave gloves had gotten stuck in the seal at the top of the freezer (very close to where our pricey reagents live) and the freezer was thawing. Notice that even today the gloves are in the same place..... OK, I just moved them.



Anyway, I think our beloved BigDye must have sat at an elevated (thawing) temperature for 12 or more hours, and things haven’t been so good since. I hope it fixes things to buy a new $800 tube of reagent, because otherwise this constant problem-solving process is making my brain hurt.

A couple of links of interest: my colleague Sarah Gilman (of former Grosberg lab fame) has a nice paper out on the predictability of organisms shifting their range in response to climate change (other friends/colleagues like Leslie Rissler are in there too), here is a page pointing to that paper. And for anybody who likes to think about the response of the planet to past glaciation, the recent earthquakes in Maine are a nice reminder that nothing is static, it is always in flux.