{"id":5627,"date":"2023-07-02T17:35:49","date_gmt":"2023-07-02T22:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/?p=5627"},"modified":"2023-07-02T17:35:49","modified_gmt":"2023-07-02T22:35:49","slug":"my-day-in-the-baugh-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/?p=5627","title":{"rendered":"My Day in the Baugh Lab"},"content":{"rendered":"

My schedule varies a lot depending on the day of the week: Mondays and Fridays are usually the busiest, and I hardly ever have benchwork on Wednesdays. This is because <\/span>C. elegans<\/span><\/i> take about three days to develop to maturity, and I usually have to wait a few days between steps. Because of this, I have a lot of experiments going on at once. In order to avoid coming in on weekends, I have to vary my weekday work accordingly.<\/span><\/p>\n

An experiment begins when I bleach the worms, a process that allows me to dissolve the <\/span>C. elegans <\/span><\/i>bodies and isolate the embryos. My project studies gonad abnormalities resulting from early-life starvation, so I then leave the embryos in a starvation culture for eight days, where their development is arrested. After that, I plate the worms, now in the first stage of larval development, onto <\/span>E. coli<\/span><\/i> (their food), and leave them to develop for three days. Their food may include RNAi, which blocks the expression of specified genes, depending on which experiment I\u2019m doing. Once these worms have reached maturity, I prepare a slide and look at them under a microscope, scoring how many have abnormalities, and how many appear normal. Around 30-50% of wild-type worms typically have gonad abnormalities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Typically, the first thing I do when I get to the lab is make a to-do list and check in with my mentor, Ivan. As the weeks have passed, I\u2019ve become more independent, but sometimes Ivan has a new technique to teach me\u2014and of course, things are always going wrong and I need his help to course-correct!<\/span><\/p>\n

I usually spend the morning passaging worms, which consists of moving seven worms of a specific stage to a new plate with fresh food growing on it. This allows me to keep all nine of my strains alive and relatively in sync. In the morning I also prepare bleach plates, which I will bleach three days later.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After lunch, I\u2019ll usually bleach whichever strains are ready that day. This usually takes me some time, as it involves several washes and cycles in the centrifuge. At the end, I calculate the density of embryos in my resulting solution, add the desired amount into test tubes, and place them in a rotating drum.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the afternoon, I also prepare RNAi plates and plate worms from starvation cultures, allowing them to grow to maturity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Typically, the last thing I do is score the worms. I\u2019ve only started scoring recently, so I\u2019m still getting used to it, but it\u2019s satisfying to complete the final step in each two-week experiment and finally get results.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If I finish my benchwork before 5, I\u2019ll typically catch up on reading, work on my experiment plan, or prepare plates for later use. After that, I head home to rest and prepare for the next day!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My schedule varies a lot depending on the day of the week: Mondays and Fridays are usually the busiest, and I hardly ever have benchwork on Wednesdays. This is because C. elegans take about three days to develop to maturity, and I usually have to wait a few days between steps. Because of this, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60994,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[658481,658459],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsurf-2023","category-week-4-bsurf-2021"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/60994"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5628,"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5627\/revisions\/5628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.duke.edu\/adhoc_org_trinity_hhr_fellows\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}