Playing catch up...before schedule...
Okay, I'm supposed to leave for vacation on Friday. I'm going to be in Rockport for a week. I can't wait for the sun, sand, water, and a fishing pole/ swimming pool. Fishing when I feel like it and swimming when I'm not fishing. Hmmmm...I'm smiling at the thought of a whole week of relaxing and lazing about.
Well, end effect of me leaving Friday is that I am not going to come into the lab or to work. Therefore I am being piled with things to do before I go. Dr. Wagner has managed to keep me very busy every day so that I will be able to get my DNA preps ready, embryos injected, and scored by Thursday. This is something of how my schedule looks/ed this week. Keep in mind that I am only in the lab from about 8-12 and everything takes that long to do.
Monday: Scrape bacterial colonies off plates and set up bacterial culture tubes. Stick in shaker overnight.
Tuesday: Perform alkaline lysis (very long process using things that could burn a hole through you such as phenol/chloroform). Then running an electrophoresis gel to determine if I did everything correctly and what sample has what I'm looking for in it.
Wednesday: PCR and Gel clean-up (purifying DNA from the alkaline lysis). Then preparing 4 dilutions of DNA with Phenol Red (a dye) and 0.1M KCl (potassium chloride for you non-science people). After that, I go collect embryos from my pairs of fish and detrmine if I can inject them. I load needles with my dilutions, distribute embryos where I want them, and then stick the needle into the embryo and inject DNA into it using a micro-manipulator (self-explanatory...manipulates the needle under the microscope). Mind you, anything involving the embryos or the glass needles (such as breaking the tips of them so that stuff will come out) has to be done under the microscope. And only picos of DNA is actually injected into each embryo, but I have to inject around 40 embryos per dilution...which in reality doesn't take that long. It's the preparing everything to inject that takes forever.
Thursday (tomorrow): Come in and score the embryos by looking at them under a flourescent microscope and sorting them into whether they are dead and degrees for green brightness. I tend to thing of it as much does the thing look like a radioactive green snowball.
Then I am done until I get back from vacation where I will either do more injections or move onto transgenesis. It all depends on how things are scored tomorrow. Whether the DNA insert worked or not.
But that is not all. Karen mentioned something in her journal about her forgetting what day it was. Common occurence for me. If it wasn't for me having to write in my lab notebook everyday, I would never know what day or date it is. Well, this is my tale from yesterday about people trying to make a Tuesday into a Wednesday (I wish I could). This is what I typed Karen in reply.
"Wednesday is our garbage day at home. So on Tuesday morning, I walk out of the house and look at the garbage cans sitting by the curb. So I look at my mother and tell her that it is Tuesday. She gives me this funny look and asks what day is the garbage day. I tell her Wednesday and she laughs. She then tells me that both her and my sister Lori hauled the garbage cans out earlier (I accidentally slept late and missed it all) without even questioning whether it was Wednesday or not.
Then one of mom's coworkers kept dating things Wednesday and kept telling my mom that she needed to get things done because she only had one more day to do it all. Then mom told her "no, I have 2 days...it's only Tuesday" and then followed by revelations around the office on how hard people were trying to make Tuesday into Wednesday. Quite hilarious actually."
That made me laugh. I love my family. Endless source of amusement.
Well, it is time for me to go. Lunch and all that. Talk to you later!
Well, end effect of me leaving Friday is that I am not going to come into the lab or to work. Therefore I am being piled with things to do before I go. Dr. Wagner has managed to keep me very busy every day so that I will be able to get my DNA preps ready, embryos injected, and scored by Thursday. This is something of how my schedule looks/ed this week. Keep in mind that I am only in the lab from about 8-12 and everything takes that long to do.
Monday: Scrape bacterial colonies off plates and set up bacterial culture tubes. Stick in shaker overnight.
Tuesday: Perform alkaline lysis (very long process using things that could burn a hole through you such as phenol/chloroform). Then running an electrophoresis gel to determine if I did everything correctly and what sample has what I'm looking for in it.
Wednesday: PCR and Gel clean-up (purifying DNA from the alkaline lysis). Then preparing 4 dilutions of DNA with Phenol Red (a dye) and 0.1M KCl (potassium chloride for you non-science people). After that, I go collect embryos from my pairs of fish and detrmine if I can inject them. I load needles with my dilutions, distribute embryos where I want them, and then stick the needle into the embryo and inject DNA into it using a micro-manipulator (self-explanatory...manipulates the needle under the microscope). Mind you, anything involving the embryos or the glass needles (such as breaking the tips of them so that stuff will come out) has to be done under the microscope. And only picos of DNA is actually injected into each embryo, but I have to inject around 40 embryos per dilution...which in reality doesn't take that long. It's the preparing everything to inject that takes forever.
Thursday (tomorrow): Come in and score the embryos by looking at them under a flourescent microscope and sorting them into whether they are dead and degrees for green brightness. I tend to thing of it as much does the thing look like a radioactive green snowball.
Then I am done until I get back from vacation where I will either do more injections or move onto transgenesis. It all depends on how things are scored tomorrow. Whether the DNA insert worked or not.
But that is not all. Karen mentioned something in her journal about her forgetting what day it was. Common occurence for me. If it wasn't for me having to write in my lab notebook everyday, I would never know what day or date it is. Well, this is my tale from yesterday about people trying to make a Tuesday into a Wednesday (I wish I could). This is what I typed Karen in reply.
"Wednesday is our garbage day at home. So on Tuesday morning, I walk out of the house and look at the garbage cans sitting by the curb. So I look at my mother and tell her that it is Tuesday. She gives me this funny look and asks what day is the garbage day. I tell her Wednesday and she laughs. She then tells me that both her and my sister Lori hauled the garbage cans out earlier (I accidentally slept late and missed it all) without even questioning whether it was Wednesday or not.
Then one of mom's coworkers kept dating things Wednesday and kept telling my mom that she needed to get things done because she only had one more day to do it all. Then mom told her "no, I have 2 days...it's only Tuesday" and then followed by revelations around the office on how hard people were trying to make Tuesday into Wednesday. Quite hilarious actually."
That made me laugh. I love my family. Endless source of amusement.
Well, it is time for me to go. Lunch and all that. Talk to you later!