Gel Electrophoresis: Help needed - (Feb/21/2014 )

I would supplement your grinding with a few cycles of freeze/thaw if that is convenient. But yes, you don't need a pure DNA preparation to do PCR. And you don't need much DNA.

So I made the TNES buffer and when I stored it over night in the fridge it turned into a milky color. I didn't think much at first but after another day it started to solidify into a jelly. should I be worried?

Did you autoclave the SDS? It is not necessary and will do weird things. Other than that, I can't imagine what is happening.

Well the SDS will precipitate at low temperature in the fridge but usually not a jelly then...perhaps something other also precipitated? Anyway warm it up and stir, if it goes away it was SDS..

It's not necessary to store it in fridge btw

I took it out of the fridge and it's starting to clear up a bit. I also ran another gel, I'll post a picture of what it looks like tonight since the computer in our lab doesn't work with gmail for whatever reason. I had 6 wells running and only one of them had some sort of cloudy product in it. I'm not sure if it's actually DNA or some sort of contaminant. Either way, I'm contemplating whether I should try to clean the DNA I got a few days ago currently sitting in TNES buffer now.

did the cloudy sample become cloudy after adding tnes or was it cloudy to start?

if it turned cloudy after addition of tnes then you may have a salt in the sample that contains potassium or some other cation that will displace the sodium in sds and form a less soluble product (eg kds).