The Truskey Lab consists of post-docs, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students all working together to make new discoveries to advance the medical field. Everyone is very helpful and supportive of each other. People are constantly teaching each other new ways of doing experiments and how to approach problems. I really enjoy the friendly community of the Truskey Lab. They make me feel very welcome and are always there to help me out.
Every day when I get the lab, I have to feed my muscle bundles. I change the media to give them to the nutrients they need to grow. Once they have grown for three days, I add shift media and the different conditions needed for my experiment for five days. On the fifth day I snap freeze the bundles with liquid nitrogen to store them. I then isolate the RNA from my bundles so that I can run PCR on them. I analyze my PCR results using melt curves and running DNA gels. I have learned so much in order to be able to perform these tasks. I’ve also come to realize the best way to learn these skills is to repeat them over and over again. A lot of measures must be taken to make sure nothing gets contaminated and grows properly. Every step requires a lot of attention to detail or else you could mess the whole experiment up.
