Here is the sequence of one of my typical days in the lab:
- Plate cells for an experiment
- Cells become infected
- Cry
ok that’s it goodbye
…alright, that’s not exactly it, but for me it’s pretty much not a week in the Blobe lab unless I infect something or the other 🙁
Anyway, like many other people, I don’t have a typical day in the lab, where I rinse and repeat protocols for every day that I come in. My schedule is more weekly, so I’ll try to explain it that way.
On Monday, I usually come in and talk to my secondary mentor, Rachel, about what experiments I should try doing for the week to explore the role of CYR-61 in cell biology. So far, I’ve done western blots, thymidine incorporation assays, scratch wound assays, and trans well assays in order to explore the role of CYR-61 in proliferation, migration, and signaling. Science, particularly science where you work with things that have to grow, naturally take time, so my Mondays largely consist of time in TC (Tissue Culture) where I collect my desired parental cells and plate them to prep for the experiments I want to do. Since I always do multiple experiments side by side in one week, I’m often really confused and mix them up with each other, but luckily Rachel is really patient and answers all of my questions throughout the week, most of which are some variation upon “so what are we doing again?”
Tuesday is usually where I will treat cells with whatever conditions my experiment requires– usually with the recombinant CYR-61 I mentioned in an earlier post to hopefully induce some kind of behavior in my cells. The rest of the week depends largely on how long I intend to treat my cells– if only 24 hours, then I can begin the next step of my experiment on Wednesday, but if for 48 I have to wait until Thursday. The next steps also depend on which experiments I am doing– if I’m running Westerns, I have to lyse my cells with a buffer that smells strongly of eggs and collect their proteins to run through a gel. For thymidine assays, I have to treat my cells with radioactive agents and run my cells through a machine that reads how much of the radioactivity is incorporated into my dividing cells.
So I guess it was a bit of a stretch to even say that I had a schedule going on a week to week basis, because every week is just so different depending on what experiments Rachel and I think I should pursue and what ends up happening with the cells– infection of your experiment means it has to be bleached and thrown out and usually also means setting you back another week. Even more fun, we’ve seen some evidence that the highest concentration of CYR-61 that I treat with might be inducing apoptosis in my cells, so I basically crawl to the microscope every day hoping that my cells have not, for some reason, died. But I enjoy the mild unpredictability of my week in the lab, and every day teaches me something new. Which I then frantically jot into my lab notebook.
