Bring Your Blog Readers to Work Day

When I walk into lab in the morning, my first move is to check in with my mentor, Saunia, about the day’s tasks. We’ll work together to form a plan for the day and she’ll give me any important information I need. Then I can review or create the protocol necessary for the day’s experiments, which have mostly been genotyping (with some variation, such as forays into imaging and when I helped with DNA extraction for sequencing a bacterial synthetic community). A typical day could look like this:

With Saunia’s input, I decide which samples to work on. Then I write up the procedure, prep my workbench, and get workin’ on preparing and aliquoting master mixes and pipetting DNA samples. I put the PCR reactions in the ThermoCycler and pour my gel, just in time for lunch with Saunia and any other members of the lab who join us. We spend anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour chatting and eating, and then it’s back to work! I run the gel, image it in the iBright, and analyze the data. Most recently we’ve been checking for homozygotes lines in our plants to decide which tissue to move forward with imaging on. At this point, if not earlier, I go to the Phytotron where our plants are kept and check if they need water. Sometimes there are more intensive plant care tasks required, like tying up unruly stems or transporting older plants to the greenhouse.

There are other small things that pop up during the day too, like opening packages for the lab. A few days a week, there will be more work required, like autoclaving biohazard waste, mixing media for the common stock, or washing tip boxes. There are meetings to attend a couple of times a week, too, although they are on a different schedule for the summer: small-group meetings every other week, lab meetings every other Monday, and a meeting with my mentor and my PI about every two weeks.

No day in lab looks exactly the same, but I’m enjoying every one of them!