Science: Bacteria

Another update on SCIENCE. I have been working on making purified protein that I can use in my experiments. You are probably asking yourselves, how do you make a pure protein. The remarkable answer is BACTERIA. The following protein adventure is made more interesting by the delightful happenstance that the proteins I am making are green and red. 

Step 1: grow the bacteria. You start off with them on agar plates and then you grow them in flasks of broth. 

Step 2: get the bacteria out of the broth. Yay centrifuges.

Step 3: bust open the bacteria to get the protein out. To do this we get to use the sonicator. It shoots sound waves at the bacteria until they pop

Step 4: filter the protein. Doesn't that look cool?

Tada! colorful filtrate!

With accompanying bench disaster.

Step 5: add glutathione beads. Glutathione is kind of like velcro it does a really good job of sticking to a protein called GST. My protein is attached to GST so it will stick to the beads but other proteins won't

Step 6: spin down the beads. Yay centrifuges!

Step 7: Use the protein!