Science: gels

I have been working trying to get all my data for my conference the end of this month. I realize that that explanation is slightly less helpful when people ask what I am doing. So here is an example. 

A staple in any science lab is a variety of gels for analyzing protein, DNA, or RNA. These are infact just fancy jello with little dents that you put your samples in. You then apply a current across the gel which makes your sample move through the gel. The different components of your sample move at different speeds depending on their size. This is a protein gel. 

After running the gel you want to be able to see your proteins so you again use electricity in a different direction to transfer your samples onto a membrane. This is a membrane of a protein gel. The stuff in the pink and blue lanes is a ladder, it lets you know how big the mysterious pink bands are. Please note the giant fat pink band in lane 7. The goal of three weeks was to eliminate that pink band. 

Now imagine a cool movie time lapse with exciting music. Ta da! the evil pink band is now gone as observed by pink and by a more sensitive gray version, which in fact looks cooler. 

Mission accomplished! Now moving on to the regrettable clean up...