When I get into lab, I usually start my day by setting up my desk: I take out and turn on my laptop, get out my notebook and pen, and put my water bottle on the corner. Besides that one set routine, everything else in the lab varies day by day. Some days I’ll be doing PCR reactions—which basically entails mixing DNA and enzymes in a tube and then putting the tubes in a machine. My PCRs can run anywhere from 1.5 hours to 2 hours plus, so my time waiting is usually spent either reading papers or Wikipedia articles relevant to my project, or using an online algorithm called BLAST to work on some bioinformatics.
A little before my PCR has completed, I have to cast my own gels. This means I just mix agarose powder with a solution, heat it up, mix in some dye, and pour it into a mold. Once the PCR has finished, I have to load and run the gel, which takes between 20 and 40 minutes. Since a lot of the things that I do require waiting, my time in lab each day is usually spent running in and out of the desk space every twenty minutes or so.
On other days, if I’m not running PCRs and gels, I may be working on gel extraction, plasmid construction, cell transformation, or cell culturing. All of these procedures take a little more time in one shot, so for these I’d be spending most of my time in the lab space.
For the other people in my lab, a lot of their day is spent similarly to mine. Though they may not be performing the same experiments or procedures as me, the nature of their work allows them to go back and forth between the lab and their laptops in the work/desk space. Usually, people eat lunch (brought from home) between 11 am and 1 pm, and people leave the lab between 4 pm and 7 pm. Overall, I’ve enjoyed working in the Lynch lab thus far!
