Question: Was it freaky the first time you cloned something?? P.S. I voted for you!

David Walker-Sünderhauf answered on 14 Mar 2019:

Thanks for voting for me 😀 No, it wasn’t freaky – just really satisfying once I got it right!
In cloning, you give your bacteria small extra pieces of DNA called plasmids, onto which you have cloned the gene of interest (for example lacZ, a gene to make them blue if they eat a certain compound). Additionally, the plasmids also have an antibiotic resistance gene – this is so that, in the lab, we can ‘select for’ bacteria that have taken up the cloned plasmid, I do this by plating them onto a plate that contains the antibiotic they should have become resistant to if everything went well.
So, the first time I cloned something, the first hint I got at it being successful was a plate that looked like this:

In this picture, every dot is a bacterial colony that can grow even though there is the antibiotic – so all these bacteria have taken up the cloned plasmid i gave them 😀
.
This was really exciting, and when I came in the morning to look at the plates (they have to be incubated overnight), it was such a great feeling to see some colonies!
.
The colonies also have to be double checked to confirm that they definitely contain the cloned gene though, but that differs depending on what gene you cloned into them!