(I’ve probably told the “I kill worms for my job!” joke far too many times, and I’m just beating a dead horse now. Won’t do it again, sorry!)
Depending on what day of the week it is, I might be doing 8 entire hours of bench work, or I might be doing almost none at all. For my personal project, different steps of the procedure require different timings, and I also help out my mentor with her project, and she has her own planned out procedure to follow. Thus, my workload can vary a good amount from day to day.
For my project only, I have five possible activities I can do (but only the middle three are actually part of the experiment):
- Strain maintenance, which occurs every Monday and Friday (or Tuesday/Thursday if Monday/Friday isn’t available)
- Chunking, which I do every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday
- Bleaching, which is usually done 3 days after chunking, so it occurs every Thursday, Friday, and the following Monday
- M cell scoring, which is done at least a week after bleaching, so I do it on the same days of the week as bleaching
- Spotting plates, which happens as necessary, but usually occurs once a week at least
Because of this procedure, I usually lack any bench work on Wednesdays, so I end up doing miscellaneous activities on that day, such as reading scientific literature, making sure my lab notebook is caught up, or helping my mentor with her project. Mondays and Fridays end up being my busiest days, so I’ll be describing a typical day for me on those two days of the week.
The first thing I do in the morning at 10 AM is worm maintenance. I grab my box of worm strains from the fridge kept at 20 degrees Celsius and choose one small plate from each strain to pick worms from. I then transfer 3-4 worms from each of these plates onto a new small plate using a worm picker, which is just a glass pipette with the end fused to a thin platinum wire that I coat with E. coil so the worms can stick to it.
Afterwards, I chunk worms from small plates that with plenty of larvae that are starving or near starving onto large plates, one per strain. Chunking involves cutting out a piece of the agar on a plate and transferring it onto another plate. It’s the same idea as maintenance, but it transfers many more worms at a time, and it’s used primarily for bleach preparation.
Bleaching takes me the longest out of all of the steps of the procedure. I won’t go into too much detail about it, but it involves transferring the worms on plates to conicle tubes, pouring bleach into the tubes, and lots of vortexing and centrifuging. Basically, bleaching can be thought of as a rather brutal process that forces eggs out of gravid (pregnant) worms and dissolves their bodies, along with other contaminants that may have been on the plates. It results in sterile, synchronized eggs, which means that the eggs are all the same age and the larvae that hatch from them will go through the same development stages at about the same time.
M cell scoring involves placing worms that were bleached a week prior onto slides, one per strain, and viewing them under a microscope to determine how many worms are on the slides and how many M cells they have, which determines if worms are under developmental arrest or not.
Lastly, I spot plates, which is simple: dripping E. coli in LB broth onto plates and allowing them to cool for a day before use. I usually do this after everything else, but occasionally I spot plates in between other activities.
Sometime in the middle of all of these things, I take a short 15-20 minute lunch break around noon. After I’m done with my own work, I often help my mentor with her project as well, which involves activities like categorizing worm strains to determine what can be bleached, bleaching with a few altered steps, adding food or drugs to bleached tubes of worms, spotting worms onto plates, etc. What I help her with varies widely depending on her own availability and the stage of the experiment we’re on, so I don’t have a structured schedule for working on her project as I do with my own.
After all this, I usually leave the lab anywhere between 4:30 and 5:30 PM, although I’ve stayed later in the past. Outside of the lab, I’m working on getting through all the scientific literature my mentor has sent me as well as making a spreadsheet of my data.
