Smearing...... looks rly bad to me - (Feb/20/2011 )

im supose to be comparing my chicken muscle vs. liver gDNA but they all look really bad to me. Can someone help suggest what happened cause im not sure even if any of the wells are any better or worse than the others.


1) Molecular weight ladder
2) K Langlais Liver Tissue
3) K Langlais Muscle Tissue
4) A Bidgood Liver Tissue
5) A Bidgood Muscle Tissue

So, what would you expect to see when you run genomic DNA? Would you expect to see discrete bands? Think about the genome and what it would look like if you unwound it...


Hint... I'm being obtuse because this is homework or a lab you should think about for yourself.

bob1 on Mon Feb 21 00:24:22 2011 said:

I was thinking that it was because the well is just overloaded because it is whole gDNA so it takes up lots of space but im wondering if its sheared or degraded at all. We have never rly gone over this in class and im not too sure how to recognize it. But thank you for your help.

what was the objective of this experiment?
you just isolate DNA from each sample and run the gel???

I really dont understand "compareing gDNA," so could you explain? (what you did and what was the expected outcome etc...)
otherwise hard to give you help....

OK, Genomic DNA is largish DNA strands usually (depends on the organism a bit, but you are working with eukaryotes, so no problem there - they all have large genomes), and you will always get some degradation and isolation of some shorter fragments, including RNA, during preparation...

3 out of 4 of your samples look OKish, not ideal, but OK. The main part of the genome in those samples is where it should be, and there isn't too much degraded DNA (which as it is degraded(smaller) should run where?), but one of your samples is pretty badly degraded.

WOuld you expect to see differences in the genomic DNA between muscle and liver from the same organism?