Categorically wrong

Individual strands of DNA are unidirectional. Typically we call one end 5' and the other 3'. My most recent experiment had good results (finally!). Earlier today I wrote and sent out a 2 page brief to my advisors telling them the results.

Unfortunately, in all the excitement I messed up my nomenclature and confused the 3' ends and 5' ends. All of my conclusions were exactly backwards. Ouch. The trends I brilliantly identified were all completely wrong.

The good news is the write-up was easy to fix, I just replaced swapped every place I wrote 3' or 5'. The other good news is I figured it out before ordering thousands of dollars of DNA for follow-ups. It was an easy mistake, but still, nothing makes one feel retarded like telling your boss(es)- hey, everything I told you a few hours ago is categorically wrong.