User:Jarle Pahr/Questions

Technical and scientific questions which can conceivable by answered by in silico or small-scale, low-cost wetlab experiments:

Non-standard growth media: Can E. coli grow on "dextro" energy tablets?

Verification of commercial personal-genomics results: Can DNA extraction, PCR and sequencing confirm a SNP result reported by 23andme?

Commercial kit performance: What are the performance properties of various commercial molecular-biology kits?

Can horse meat be reliably detected by a cheap, at-home PCR test?

Do dNTPs show up during gel electrophoresis?

pllD: Can activity of the pllD promoter be shown by expression of GFP in a minimal medium?

Given a certain mutation rate, for how long can one expect maintain 100 % sequence preservation in a plasmid. When working with plasmids, a very large number of DNA molecules is handled simultaneously, but mutations occur in discrete molecules. What are the "population dynamics" of mutations?

What organisms live in a home environment? Can culturing, PCR and 16S sequencing be used to identify those organisms?

Does molten agarose contract or expand when solidifying?

What is the smallest amount of plasmid DNA that reliably yield transformants?

LA medium darkens when stored in liquid form (warm) before pouring. What is the cause of this? Does it affect the nutritional properties of the medium?

Can small (~100 bp fragments) be succesfully cloned by SLIC? How? Suggestions: Use klenow polymerase, or very short incubation times. (add dCTP after 0 seconds, 10 s, 30 s, etc.). Klenow fragment has both 3'-5' exonuclease and 5'-'3 polymerase activity, so stopping the reaction with dCTP should work same as with T4 DNA polymerase.

How does PCR yield vary with annealing temperature for a given reaction?

Big questions

Oligonucleotide synthesis: Will there be further radical improvement?