I consider myself very lucky with regards to the amount of progress that I’ve made throughout the course of this summer. There have been several occasions where headway was stalled, but a workaround always seemed to present itself. For example, when my grad student Allie and I needed fluorescent markers to tag conjugated cells—and this happened multiple times—there would seemingly always be other grad students in that lab who conveniently had the same fluorescent markers for us to use. Though first-time runs of optimization experiments rarely produced perfect data, they almost always were descriptive enough for us to figure out what to change. In other words, we never really got significantly stuck on something, which is highly surprising considering neither my grad student nor I have ever worked with C. elegans.
After 6 weeks of optimizing my experiment to test conjugation in vivo, I am finally at the point of carrying it out. I have loads of data—some good and some muddled—all pointing towards the idea that this experiment will produce reliable insights into in vivo conjugation. I look forward to the coming week, as well as finishing off my poster in preparation for the 24th!
