There isn’t really a “typical day” in my lab. There is a reasonably large variance in what I do day to day. Despite that, I can give the broad categories that the things I do fit under.
The first of these is traditional wet lab stuff. I’ll run PCRs, digest them, and gel them to genotype mice. I sometimes have to transfer samples into different storage mediums. Some of the work that I might be moving in to doing as we have samples that warrant analysis includes assays to measure fat content and western blots to look at protein levels. I also spend some time researching and learning new techniques.
Another large chunk of my time is devoted to running experiments and caring for the animals our lab uses to test our therapies. This includes feeding the dogs we use to test some therapies and injecting dextrose into some of our mice. This also includes tests to look at the efficacy of our therapies. I do a lot of glucose tolerance tests and glucose curves where we look at the animal’s blood glucose over time. I fast the animal, give a dextrose injection in the case of a tolerance test, and check the animal’s blood sugar at various time points. I also perform wire hangs to look at the strength of the mice since their condition effects their muscles. I also help to collect tissue when the animals reach their endpoint, which is really interesting since I get to see anatomy firsthand.
The final “block” of my time is spent doing more desk-oriented tasks. Some of this is inputting the data I collect and then using software to analyze and graph that data. The rest of this time is spent researching. This includes reading papers related to my project to see what others are doing and what parts of their studies could be relevant to our research.
Some days I’ll spend mostly at the bench pipetting and doing proper wet lab stuff. Some days I’ll be in the mouse room for a number of hours, or at my desk for a significant amount of time. Other times, it’s a mix of the three. I do like the variety that my lab has; it helps to break up time and keep me doing something fresh and interesting.
