What do wanna bet these two met at work? A biologist wanted to propose to his girlfriend, who is also a biologist. He asked her to image his electrophoresis gel, (wink wink) if you know what I mean.
But it was a special mixture of DNA fragments he cooked up just for the occasion.
They're 5 sized PCR fragments (roughly 150, 300, 500, 700, 1kb), I went back through my notes to find 5 primer pairs that I knew worked pretty well (so don't feel bad, they're selected out of primers that had been pre-validated =p). The other lanes are just mixes of the 5 sizes (either 2:3:4 or 4:6 volume mixes going in decreasing size, since larger fragments tend to be brighter). The gel actually didn't take that long (though it was terrifying loading it), but I made a mockup in Illustrator beforehand (along with a ladder to test what sizes to use), and then sketched it out beforehand so I knew what to add to each lane.
Well, that makes perfect sense. I just feel so much better to know that they were pre-validated. Anyway, you see the results of the imaging here. And she said yes! Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science