No, I am not a giantess.

"I have a long and storied history of failing amazingly at acrylamide gels. Usually it's only the sequence-length ones that do creative things; the little protein gels generally treat me pretty well. At first, the gel appears fine. However, [given perspective], you will see that I have, once again, succeeded in creatively failing. No, I am not some giantess of extremely large proportions. Yes, my PI was less than thrilled. On the plus side, this is likely the cutest thing I ever will accomplish in lab. And, if I could reliably reproduce it (but what scientist can reliably reproduce results, right?), I could probably quit my day job and make and sell them as little science-nerd pins or something. Alas, attempts to reproduce this have, of course, failed. Yay, science!"

The universe in a DNA gel...

"I exposed my ethidium bromide-stained gel to UV light, only to discover a galaxy of speckles (still not sure why...) and no PCR products. :(.  But on the bright side, I think I can see Orion's belt!"

When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set your radioactive acrylamide electrophoresis apparatus on fire!

**Note: this is photographic re-enactment, and does not represent the actual event described.

"During my Master's research a few years ago, I was running many acrylamide gels, to examine small differences in sequence length of some DNA markers. To visualize the results on X-ray film, I was labelling the DNA fragments with radioactive 32P. The gels themselves are made of a lovely mixture of acrylamide, urea, and formamide. Urea isn't so bad, but formamide is toxic and flammable, and acrylamide is my favourite chemical because it's a known neurotoxin and suspected carcinogen, which translates to "the brain lesions kill you before the cancer has a chance to metastasize". When running, the gels, loaded with radioactive material, run at about 2000 volts for a couple of hours.

One day I came into the lab, set up everything as usual, then departed to do something else while the gel was running. I came back to an empty lab to find smoke emerging from the electrode terminals on the top of the gel rig. Buffer and some gel material had leaked out, reducing the electrical contact area to a tiny droplet of buffer, which overheated and started the plastic structure smoldering.

Cleaning up that mess was almost as much fun as the time my thermal cycler crapped out all of its coolant fluid (ethylene glycol) onto the bench top while running radio-labelled PCR."

What happens when you pour a gel with water instead of TAE?

"I primarily did undergrad research in computational biology, so my first rotation in grad school was my first time doing "wet" molecular biology that wasn't for a lab course. I think I spent 1 1/2 weeks making gels with water. During that span of time, I asked a bunch of people what I was doing wrong and I got the usual advice to change the concentration of various things. Finally, a postdoc figured it out. The rest of my "wet lab" experiments went OK during that rotation!"