(no subject)
So I thought I would post a little about my new job:
I'm officially working for 3 units (>9 hours per week) in Dr. Andrew Fisher's lab. Dr. Fisher works on X-ray Crystallography for the chemistry department, but also does research on kinetic characterizations of enzymes (eg biochem!). In our lab there are three graduate students, one foreign scholar, and four undergrads including me. Zhihao, my graduate student, is super cool and shows me everything once before setting me loose to try it on my own! He encourages independent thinking...so it's good that I take detailed lab notes in *gasp* my very own official lab notebook!
I'm doing a research project to express, purify and crystallize an enzyme involved in the processing pathway for tRNA. This enzyme specifically sulfurylates the portion of the tRNA that is involved in recognizing wobble bases during protein translation. We clone the gene for our protein into a vector, then express it, purify it and run high through-put assay trays to try to discover what conditions will produce pure crystals big enough to get detailed diffraction. This information can then be used to ascertain the 3 dimensional structure and spatial arrangement of the protein.
So far I've learned and applied a lot of techniques - media preparation, cell culturing, affinity columns, dialysis, buffer prep, HPLC (ugh! too many tubes). Exciting! So far I'm loving it, so hopefully it'll only get better as the year progresses!
I also think it's time to post picture of my Sunny. I had some younger ones of right when I got him, but they got erased :(. So here's a couple around 4 months!
I'm officially working for 3 units (>9 hours per week) in Dr. Andrew Fisher's lab. Dr. Fisher works on X-ray Crystallography for the chemistry department, but also does research on kinetic characterizations of enzymes (eg biochem!). In our lab there are three graduate students, one foreign scholar, and four undergrads including me. Zhihao, my graduate student, is super cool and shows me everything once before setting me loose to try it on my own! He encourages independent thinking...so it's good that I take detailed lab notes in *gasp* my very own official lab notebook!
I'm doing a research project to express, purify and crystallize an enzyme involved in the processing pathway for tRNA. This enzyme specifically sulfurylates the portion of the tRNA that is involved in recognizing wobble bases during protein translation. We clone the gene for our protein into a vector, then express it, purify it and run high through-put assay trays to try to discover what conditions will produce pure crystals big enough to get detailed diffraction. This information can then be used to ascertain the 3 dimensional structure and spatial arrangement of the protein.
So far I've learned and applied a lot of techniques - media preparation, cell culturing, affinity columns, dialysis, buffer prep, HPLC (ugh! too many tubes). Exciting! So far I'm loving it, so hopefully it'll only get better as the year progresses!
I also think it's time to post picture of my Sunny. I had some younger ones of right when I got him, but they got erased :(. So here's a couple around 4 months!