No background

Great success yesterday. My comparison of different rabbit sera to find one with sufficiently low background to detect minute quantities of Sxy yielded great results. One of the serum preps I had not tested back in 2004 when preparing antibodies turns out to have great signal with almost no detectable background. Today I'm redoing blots of cells grown to OD 0.2. Sxy levels are very low in WT and sxy-6 and -7 mutants at OD 0.2, so it has been hard to get satisfactory measures of Sxy levels for these strains. Now, I think we'll get accurate measures of Sxy levels for these strains. Later today I will run gels and blot the protein from last week's nucleotide supplementation experiments, thus tomorrow we will find out how/if Sxy levels vary significantly when hypercompetence mutants are treated with AMP and GMP.