betamarie

Last week I tried to transform some E Coli from a TA Cloning kit that I've always gotten to work for me. They were old plasmid that someone had already made a long time ago that were in the freezer. The concentration was low...10^6 molecules per microliter. When I first tried to transform them, I only added 1 uL of plasmid to 25uL of cells and got no colonies. Then after I talked to the post doc who originally made these plasmids, his advice was to bump up everything so I used 10uL of plasmid in 50uL of cells and got these fat clear colonies, rather than small tight white ones like I expected. I figured I had just let them grow out too long, but it was Friday and I didn't want to come in on the weekend so I put them in the fridge until today and I had planned on streaking one of the colonies on a plate to purify/separate them out overnight to get the tiny white colonies before setting up culture tubes for minipreps tomorrow. I went to look at my plates this morning, and they are blank. The "fat clear colonies" are gone and the plates are empty. I am totally confused. Has anyone seen this happen before?