Happy science

This picture made me very happy today! It means that I have enough samples ready to finish my big microbiome screening and that we likely will be able to leave for Millbrook by the end of the week!

For those of you who want to know what you're looking at here: this is an image of an 'electrophoresis gel', which has a stain in it that makes DNA visible. The like stripes are DNA bands. Every colomn holds a sample and if you see a band it means that insect (ant, aphid or mealybug) had bacteria in it that I was able to extract DNA from. As a sneak preview towards the results: the aphids and mealybugs have, as expected, bacteria inside their bodies, the ants (mostly) don't (those are the gaps).