Defining moments of grad school (Part 4)
- April 26, 2007: Back in 2002, a collaborator of ours showed some data with some IL-1R knockout mice. In 2004, I enter grad school, pick up a project in which half of the hypothesis hinges on that data. In 2005, I want to reproduce that data. I order mice from Jackson, spend time breeding them, and spend time breeding them to some other knockouts that I have in order to generate some double knockouts for other experiments, etc. In 2007, I repeat the original experiment. I can't reproduce their data. I repeatedly can't reproduce the data. I despair, thinking that the project is ruined. I decide to take the project in a different direction. Today, I find that our collaborator used mice on a different background, which means that I have spent two years of my life breeding up and using mice and trying to generate data WITH THE WRONG MICE. I want to go home and drink beer. Now.
For those of you who may care, the mice they used were on a mixed BL/6 x 129 background, but they used BL/6 mice for their controls. JAX sells two strains of IL-1R-/- mice, one on a mixed background and one on a BL/6 background. I suppose that if I had really really wanted to do their experiment exactly, I should have looked at their Materials and Methods more carefully and ordered the same exact mice. However, the better science is to do the experiment with the mice fully backcrossed to BL/6, because we do all of our experiments with BL/6 mice, their controls were BL/6 mice, and I was going to generate double knockouts with IL-1R and another knockout strain that was fully backcrossed to BL/6. So I ordered the knockouts on the BL/6 background and proceeded to breed them and make double knockouts. Why I didn't repeat the original experiment for another two years, only the black hole of graduate school knows the answer to that. Again, with the beer.