Sowing seeds

After working half a year I finally got my protocol to work, so my experiments are beginning next week. That means I've been sowing seeds these last days.

I sow the seeds on MS agar using a pipette and place one seed at a time (hopefully) on the agar. Usually I have 30 seeds on each plate, so for the 12 plates I did tonight, that's 360 seeds. I never imagined I'd spend so much time sowing hundreds of seeds every week!

Luckily it's with sowing on agar as with a lot of lab-stuff: eventually you get the hang of it and can do it MUCH faster. And you stop poking holes in the agar (or you do it a lot less) but even better, the plates stops becoming contaminated. The first time I did this my plates ended up being covered in mold. Feel kind of sorry for the poor little Arabidopsis seedlings that has gone all white!

Also, notice the random placement of the seedlings- and they grow on top of each other :)

Turns out even sowing seeds have to be re-learnt when you're doing it in the lab!