By Søren Beck Jensen, postdoc TREC
We are back in the laboratory. The ELISA we started yesterday has simmered overnight and is now ready to give us a result. 
As promised a yellow colour appears in some of the wells in the plate. Some wells are darker yellow than others meaning that some of the samples we measure contains more of the protein we are interested in than other samples.At this point, the ELISA is comparable to a dish that has just come out of the oven. The chef tastes the dish to know if he can serve it in his restaurant. In the laboratory, we use a machine called an ELISA reader to measure exactly how yellow each of the wells are. This gives us a flavour of how the experiment went. Here the experiment went well and we want to present it. The ELISA reader quantifies the yellowness and we serve the results in a graph format instead of in the multi-well plate. We have tried six different combinations of ingredients in this experiment. Four of the combinations (orange, green, blue and purple) turn out to become more yellow than the two (pink and turquoise). This is presented in the graph below where dots of the same colour contains the same ingredients and the label below the axis indicates what the ingredients are.
For other scientists to evaluate our result we will need to provide the recipe, but that is only when we publish our results in a scientific journal. For now, the “chef” will keep some of the ingredients her secret. Any good chef would do that until the meal is one delicious combination of treats.
