"I have a long and storied history of failing amazingly at acrylamide gels. Usually it's only the sequence-length ones that do creative things; the little protein gels generally treat me pretty well. At first, the gel appears fine. However, [given perspective], you will see that I have, once again, succeeded in creatively failing. No, I am not some giantess of extremely large proportions. Yes, my PI was less than thrilled. On the plus side, this is likely the cutest thing I ever will accomplish in lab. And, if I could reliably reproduce it (but what scientist can reliably reproduce results, right?), I could probably quit my day job and make and sell them as little science-nerd pins or something. Alas, attempts to reproduce this have, of course, failed. Yay, science!"
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Hey, there could be a paper in this - check out this paper
ReplyDelete"Shrinky-Dink microfluidics: rapid generation of deep and rounded patterns"
http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/LC/article.asp?doi=b711622e
I did that once (though mine wasn't quite as uniformly square as your lovely example). I painted the back with liquid paper, glued a magnet to the back, and had a lovely ornament for my file cabinet until it eventually fell one too many times & crumbled. Beautiful work! :)
ReplyDeletefake, obvious fake...
ReplyDeleteHey, this has happened to me as well - in my case, thanks to too much acid in the destaining solution (it was fixed by letting the gel shake in dH2O for a bit post-destain). Perhaps you could try using that to replicate your results?
ReplyDeleteBack in the late 80's someone (Pharmacia, I think) actually sold an electrophoresis apparatus that ran gels just that size. They laid flat on the bed of the equipment, and you made wells by pressing a plastic template onto Parafilm to mold tiny indentations, in which you put very tiny volumes of sample. You could stain and dry them and tape them right into your notebook!
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