Swift Fish Net

I spent the majority of this past week processing lysed ES cells into purified DNA. It was rather tedious, but my pipetting thumb should now be in real good shape for a thumb war.

The good part is that the next step is a PCR screen to look for homologous recombinants of a knock-in mouse construct. The PCR setup up should only take a few hours as I have a database and robot automation set up to take care of the reaction setup and the electrophoresis. I have actually considered automating the DNA prep as well, but the robot setup time is probably not worth it as it is unusual to need quite that many samples processed at once. This particular construct seems to have an especially low rate of homologous recombination and more often than not the recombination is occurring on the wrong side of the mutation we are trying to introduce so that we are left with a wild-type KI ES cell.