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Hey Stephanie,

Sorry to get back to you on a Sunday evening. I just had a few things I was wondering if you could reconsider on the way I was graded for my characterization data analysis, some of which we discussed at the end of the lab session on Thursday.

In terms of losing points for choosing the wrong molecular weights from the yellow key sheet in the lab, I was confused as to which to pick and chose the one that was calibrated with the gel we used in our experiment (4-12%) because it was not explained.

For the section where I lost points for not explaining our lack of BME use, I only included that line to qualify our lack of use. I am sure many other groups did not include the section, as it was not really necessary. I lost points for not explaining what BME did, but I clearly included a line which said that BME breaks disulfide bonds. Any degradation in a gel will produce more bands.

The rubric stated that we need to "qualify or quantify" our molecular weight data. It did not clearly state that we needed a percent error calculation (which would have been quantification) so we opted for qualification because it seemed more clear-cut. We explained the molecular weight of our protein and why we thought it was BSA, so we should not lose points for not including a quantification.

Lastly, the carbonic anhydrase comparison was never meant to claim that our protein was carbonic anhydrase (which it could not have been because it was not an option) it was only meant to compare the experimental characteristics of our protein after an initial test to another known protein on the standard, which was really all we had to compare to at the time.

Again, thank you for reconsidering. I realize it may be inconvenient, but with some concepts missing from the rubric, we were shooting in the dark for a lot of the analysis and I believe we did a job that deserved a better grade than a B for the reasons listed above.

Thanks again,

Evan Zaucha