SREL DNA Lab
PFGE Results

The gel photo and graphs below demonstrate the results of our storage treatment experiment.

The colored, boxed gel lanes in the photo exhibit each of the four treatments (tx) run twice for fish #2 -- yellow boxes for treatment A (citrate/DMSO frozen), green boxes for treatment C (STE fresh), blue boxes for treatment WB (whole blood frozen), and red boxes for treatment D (STE frozen).  (The middle and side lanes are size standards.)  The closer to the origin (well) that the DNA stays, the less it is fragmented.

You can see from the gel photo that the DNA in the green boxes (treatment C) did not run far from the wells, but the DNA in the red boxes (treatment D) moved the farthest down their lanes.  We've turned the gel photo into brightness-by-distance-from-origin graphs of individual lanes of DNA for better comparison of storage treatment effects. 

It is apparent from these results that:  fresh storage of blood in 100mM STE is best; how  samples are treated can have a significant impact on the outcome of assessing DNA strand breakage; and sample storage must be strictly consistent.