Tag Archives: nanodrop

The random number generator

So, I loaded my periplasmic extraction to nanodrop  (“or the random number generator”, as some other grad students call it) and it estimated DNA concentrations of 60-90 ng/ul!!!!!!. That is alarming because the curves were like real DNA curves. They were not shifted to the right like phenol contaminated samples are, but 260/280 was close to 2 (typical of RNA) instead of 1.8.  Read: http://www.nanodrop.com/Library/T042-NanoDrop-Spectrophotometers-Nucleic-Acid-Purity-Ratios.pdf

nanodrop

So, my first thought was….#$#&*%# maybe I have alarming contamination rates of chromosomal DNA. I loaded my samples at an agarose gel and I saw like the classical picture gel of an RNA extraction. rna

This is not my gel (it is an RNA extraction gel I found online), but it is very similar to my gel.

At least, RNA contamination is an easier problem than chromosomal DNA contamination.