06/02/2026
I’ve seen more newer labs starting to include gel photos with customer results, so I wanted to explain why The Silkie Lab does not provide gel images with every report. I've been doing this for 2.5 years now, and my tests that I run are not the same as many others that you see now. I do not use the primers that you can just go purchase from another company, they are all custom created.
A gel photo is not the same thing as a customer result.
Gel electrophoresis is a lab interpretation tool. It is used during testing as part of the process, but the raw image itself is not always useful or meaningful without knowing the exact primer set, expected band sizes, controls, sample layout, gel percentage, ladder, run time, and the custom protocol used for that test.
Many of my tests use custom primers and custom workflows. That means my gels may not look the same as another lab’s gel, a published example, or a generic chart online. Without my internal protocol, a customer, or another person looking at the image, would not be able to properly interpret it.
And honestly? Some perfectly valid runs are not pretty.
A gel can have bright wells, background glow, primer-dimer, faint non-result bands, uneven lanes, or other visual noise while still giving clear, readable results to the person who knows what they are looking at. A photo like this can look confusing if you are not the one running the test, but it can still contain the information needed to call the results accurately.
Providing raw gel photos can also create unnecessary confusion. Customers may compare their gel to someone else’s, try to interpret bands without the protocol, or assume something is wrong because the image does not look “clean” or textbook-perfect.
For that reason, I provide the actual interpreted result, not raw lab images for every sample.
That result is what matters most: what was tested, what was detected, and what that means for your bird.
I know gel photos can look exciting and transparent, but transparency does not always mean handing over raw data that can be easily misunderstood. To me, transparency means giving accurate results, clear explanations, and protecting the testing process that makes those results reliable.
The Silkie Lab uses custom testing methods, and those protocols are not publicly shared in order to protect the work behind them.
So while I completely understand why people like seeing gel photos, I do not provide them as a routine part of customer reports. My focus is on giving you a clear, accurate, easy-to-understand result without requiring you to interpret lab images yourself.
So even though this is one of my more ugly gels, I wanted to share this one with you all. It's cropped (as there were 62 samples in it), but, to someone not knowing what I am running, this gel would look very confusing and wrong. There are multiple species ran here, 2 negative control lanes, and some background noise. However, these results are clear and match all of my expected results perfectly.
