A day in the life…

My daily life in the Haynes lab has drastically morphed during my first month there. While I have shifted far away from the constant safety training videos and pipetting practices that filled my entire day the first week and a half, a lot of my day is still full of learning. Some days I am meeting with PI’s from other labs or post-docs to discuss different aspects of my research project, including the chemistry of my buffers and the mutation lineage of my antibodies, in order to gain a better understanding of what particular problems I am trying to solve. Some days I am running around trying to weigh, shake, spin, pH and transport several different buffers between the third and fourth floor. Some days I sit at my workstation and stare at different numbers until my coffee kicks in and I can figure out how to get mg from a concentration of ug/ml. (Actually, that’s most days). And some days I just watch the lab technicians run their assays as they explain to me each step that they are doing and why.

My most recent day in the lab, and to date my most exciting, was spent buffer exchanging my antibodies (currently in PBS) into my six different buffers. It took up the majority of my day since I had to find the buffers, filter them and then transport them back to the lab, which turned out to be significantly easier than trying to hunt down the antibodies that I needed. Not to mention that I had to do  20 minutes worth of math to figure out how much of everything I needed. And then the real work began. I had to take each antibody and add a certain amount of the six different buffers then centrifuge it five times for five minutes. This, of course, had to be repeated four times. The end result was 24 tiny tubes, each of which has to be nanodropped to determine the exact concentration, but I haven’t gotten to that stage yet.

Since buffer exchanging is the first stage of my research project, I’m excited that I got so much of it done on Friday. I’m definitely looking forward to beginning to run ELISA with all 24 of my little concoctions so I have information to write down in my fancy black lab notebook. Until then enjoy this photo of my rack full of antibody just waiting to be exchanged into a new solution.

6 tubes of DH511.2_k3 alongside 10X Histidine Sodium Chloride, 10X Acetate, 10X Citric Acid Sodium Chloride and HBS-N.

6 tubes of DH511.2_k3 alongside 10X Histidine Sodium Chloride, 10X Acetate, 10X Citric Acid Sodium Chloride and HBS-N.

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