The grad student working on the mass-spectrometry analysis of GFAJ-1 DNA is still making sure his results meet his high standards, but as soon as they are ready he'll send them to me and I'll post them here. In the meantime, since he and his supervisors have concluded that the DNA contains no arsenic, we've started writing our paper. We're going to submit it to Science as a Brevia. These are very short peer-reviewed articles (one page, one figure), which we think suits this work very well.But first we need to replicate our results. My plan is to generate some detailed growth curves for cultures with various levels of phosphate, with and without 40 mM arsenate. For this I'll use a BioScreen machine that belongs to a neighbouring lab. This machine automates collection of optical density data from cultures growing in wells of 100-well plates. I'll also grow big batches of cells for new DNA preps, using the same media and culture conditions as before.
This should only take a few days, and I hope to have the DNAs ready to send to my collaborators on Monday.
