THE MINIPREP CHALLENGE

Everything is more fun when it's a mean-spirited competition, so we decided to have a little miniprep challenge in lab (minipreps are ways to isolate circular pieces of DNA from bacterial cells). Everything is even more fun when it is culturally insensitive, so we decided to compete against all the German (and Austrian) students in our lab. Unicorns (and USA) vs. Germans, in all-out plasmid prep battle...CAN...YOU...HANDLE...IT!!!?!??!?!!!



We decided that we couldn't just compete on time, because cutting corners can reduce the DNA yield. Our final measure was nanograms of DNA isolated over seconds of miniprep time. If you think you can beat the Unicorns, we did eight five milliliter minipreps of the pCDF-Duet vector, a low copy plasmid from Novagen. Try just beating us on time though, I dare ya.

Final Scores:

Respond to the video on youtube or comment on this post if you think your lab is awesomer (ha!), or if you are a Qiagen representative and want to give us free stuff/a lucrative sponsorship.

For First-Year Grad Students