Blackcurrenty goodness
Bit of a sciencey one this, sorry.

In the lab I used to work in, we spent a lot of time purifying proteins. It's a fairly time consuming job and pretty dull, but if you want to get good data from your experiments, it's important that you know the quality and purity of the stuff you're using. One technique to do this is called gel electrophoresis. In simple terms, you pass the purified sample through a gel by running an electrical current across it. The sample separates out as small things run faster through the gel and will appear at the bottom, big things at the top.
One of the guys we worked with used to make a bright purple protein. He never ran gels to check the purity as he was pretty confident he was always getting the right stuff.

We discovered that if you mix blue ink and ribena, you get a solution that is exactly the same colour as the protein. And so we waited till he had an undergrad student in who he was teaching to run gels, then made the switch.

He took the gel out after an hour and, no protein. He ran it again, nothing. My boss, wise to what we'd done made intelligent sounding noises about contaminants and denaturation of the sample. Then said, with a serious tone in her voice... "you do realise that this puts the last two years of work you've done under scrutiny, after all, we have no evidence that any of your samples are the right ones. We might have to withdraw the papers you've written..."

The sight of him, at his desk, shaking like a broken man was too much for us to bear and we 'fessed up. He took it pretty well, I think he only called us cunts two or three times.

Eee, us science geeks know how to party. It's a laugh a minute, I tells ya. *sobs*

Length? about 5.5 nanometers...
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Sun 16 Dec 2007, 3:01, Reply)