Everyday has its own kookiness in the Coers lab, so let me just pick a day.
Oldies music greets me when I walk into work. It’s Funk Friday as everyone calls it. I laugh at some of the songs that come on. But this is a tradition. They say that, on rare occasions, even the PI will come in and dance a little to the music.
I go to sit at my desk in East Germany (not quite sure of the origin of this – I’ll have to ask – but the lab is made up of two rooms called East and West Germany).
Then, I pull up the article that we will be discussing at the lab meeting today. It’s on the specific role of various proteins involved in an innate immune response to T. gondii. I copy the abstract and write out my questions.I review some other notes that I’ve written out from my discussion with my secondary mentor, Tony. Again, I note my questions.
Lab meeting rolls around quickly. Everyone shares the data that they’ve collected and discuss the progress of their experiments. Then Tony presents the article that everyone in the lab discusses together. I ask my question from this paper and receive an extremely useful answer, which I jot down quickly in the margins of my notebook.
Soon, we return to lab. After lunch, I ask Tony some of the questions I had in my notes. Then I go into the tissue culture room and transfect two different cell lines with CRISPRs and place them in the incubator. It’s time to wait on the cells now.
I go back to my desk and review the results of an earlier genotyping PCR experiment and try to interpret it. The PI comes in and discusses the results with me and voices his misgivings. We discuss whether it’s necessary to repeat the PCR. Then, I spend the rest of my time writing in my lab journal and watching online tutorials.
This is a day at the Coers lab.
