Today, we began by presenting and watching our presentations of rare diseases or afflictions. Our disease was Mixed Connective Tissue Disease (MCTD) and is a very rare systemic inflammatory rheumatic disease caused by autoimmunity, meaning that your immune system mistakenly attacks your body’s healthy cells and in this case, your immune system is attacking fibers that form the structure of your body. We also found that although this is a rare condition, another condition called Lupus is a much more common disease in which you may or may not have one or more of the classic inflammatory rheumatic diseases–which includes MCTD. We also found that the term “mixed” present in the definition refers to when the patient has overlapping features of the classic inflammatory rheumatic diseases. This was a very interesting experience researching about different rare diseases or afflictions and learning about what others researched.
In the afternoon, we began our restriction enzyme digest using the following ingredients which we placed in different combinations in 3 different tubes: water, pGLO, EcoRI enzyme, NheI enzyme, and a 10x buffer. We had to place these materials in a specific order, ensuring that the enzyme was placed last as to make sure the reaction didn’t begin too early. We then placed the tubes in a water bath for about an hour so that the reaction could occur. We then added coloring to the solutions in each of the tubes and loaded the gel using micropipettes to inject the solutions into the wells of the gel. This was most likely my favorite part because we had previously learned about loading gels and this was the first time that we were able to load them for a real experimental procedure. Dr. Todd then turned on the electric current to the gels to stimulate the opposite charges, causing the DNA, which has a negative charge, to move to the other side of the gel, which has a positive charge. After this, we took our previously grown bacteria from the fridge and spread it about our new, individual plates and placed them in the incubator. We had many interesting experiences today including learning about rare diseases, loading gels, and spreading plates.
