Whether there’s a BSURF morning meeting or not, I start my day with a short walk to the Dong Lab in BioSci. I take a few minutes to settle in and wait to meet with either one of my mentors. If I’m waiting for her to finish an experiment or if she’s in a meeting, I work on my laptop. I’ll usually use this to read scientific papers correlated to my research and make sure my lab notebook is up to date. When I meet with my mentor, we talk about what experiments need to be done for the day and whether we will be conducting them together or separately. If we are doing the experiment together, she walks me through the protocols ensuring that I understand everything before we begin. If I’m working by myself, I read through the protocols and prepare the materials I need.
These past four weeks I’ve been doing a lot of experiments that are delicate (aka things easily can and probably will go wrong). Because of this I’ve been doing a lot of troubleshooting. Some mornings instead of reading the protocols for new experiments, I’ll spend some time looking over the experiments I had issues with the day prior. I will then repeat the experiment, being more careful with the technique or analyzing possible problems. For example, this past week when I ran a gel electrophoresis, my DNA plasmid had degraded. I wasn’t sure what happened as I had just checked the concentration. The next day I ran the gel again, and I got the same results. I rechecked the plasmid concentration; it had gone down but not enough to where bands wouldn’t show up in the gel. I decided to check the enzyme I was using for contamination. I used a new enzyme and the old one with the plasmids I was experiencing problems with and plasmids I had isolated about a week prior. After running the gels, it was clear that something was wrong with the plasmids themselves and not the enzyme. After troubleshooting, I either continue with a new experiment or start the previous one over if I have to. In this case, I had other plasmids so I could move on to the next technique.
Now that I have the plasmids I need, I will be moving on to more hands-on techniques in the coming weeks. Before, I would run tests that would have waiting periods ranging from one hour to 24 hours. On those days, I would use this time to either eat lunch, discuss the research with my mentor, or work on my laptop. In the remaining weeks of the program, I will probably have less waiting periods and spend more time directly in the lab learning new techniques, collecting data, and hopefully producing results.
