New, Improved DNA Purification Kit (We Hope)

On the advice of Leland in another lab, we're switching to GeneClean kits for purifying DNA from gels of PCR products. Leland's experience is that the Qiagen kit we've been using tends to trap too much DNA during purification, leading to low DNA concentrations in your product (kinda like we've found). So, for another $146 and change, I'm ordering a kit good for 200 preps. Hopefully we'll have it by the end of the week and it'll make a difference as we PCR our current purified PCR product. We don't even have 40 samples in our screening of stippled studfish DNA, so that kit should do us. The piss of it is that I still have a fair number of the Qiagen spin columns used in their process. And I'm still within budget for the project; since I'm not getting Defense or NASA money I pretty much have to stay within budget, of course...

Joe Scanlan is up for the trip to Cleburne and Randolph counties on Tuesday. I've been looking at Google Earth images of the area, and I've found lots of commercial-size poultry houses scattered about the countryside. This isn't a good sign; large-scale poultry farming almost always releases lots of nutrients to local streams causing algal blooms and fish kills, just the kind of environment for which stippled studfish have a very low tolerance. I've found maybe two sites we'll visit that seem removed from poultry housing, and two sites that are unfortunately close to such farming. One of these sites is at the Little Tallapoosa River, which seems to be small enough to be sampled by seining. As always, we'll see. The weather forecast is for extremely hot and humid that day so wading in even a eutrophic stream will be refreshing.