I spent the last month on trying to make a nice homogeneous network of microtubules (and I did some other stuff as well), but it didn't really work until we switched some chemicals. So far, my protocol was made for single microtubules and not networks. We reconstructed a protocol from a paper which says how we can make networks now.
And it's fantastic if your experiment works after you spent a lot of time with it! We've nearly reproduced the image from literature :)
So I learned, that it's important to respect all details in an experiment (when to add what, why which chemical is used exactly and that we have to be careful with the temperature when it comes to proteins - all the mixing I do happens on ice which is not easy to carry out so that the tubulin can not polymerize to microtubules).
