Before I write the rest of this series, I should probably talk about day zero. The part before anything actually happens. Walking into the senior center for the first time felt quieter than I...
When I came into the lab and saw that there were no colonies on any of the plates, it was a bit frustrating. No colonies meant the bacteria never took up the plasmid, which meant all the cloning work...
Week 6 was about taking all the DNA work from the previous weeks and finally turning it into something functional. The main focus was continuing to work with the pMIG-II plasmid and understanding why...
Week 5 is no different. The gel electrophoresis machine is broken. We had to borrow equipment from the other lab. Hopefully this one is better. We started by analyzing a gel from earlier in the...
The biggest, new concept I learned in week 4 was how to design restriction enzymes and perform a digestion reaction. Up until now, most of the procedures in the lab had just been protocols that I...
Week 3 started off with a mouse dissection. It was both fascinating and a little gross. I saw exactly how to collect different types of cells from organs. For example, bone marrow cells are washed out...
Part 2. I want to try to explain the first two experiments I ran without randomly throwing scientific jargon. It was finally time to learn by doing. The first experiment I did was PCR plasmid...
And so it began. Week 2 of SC-ACE. First week in my new lab. We started off with an absolutely brain-frying lab meeting from 9 am to 2 pm. I got my introduction to Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and the...
Micropipettes are surprisingly difficult to master. A micropipette is a lab tool used to measure and move very small amounts of a liquid. These volumes are measured in microliters (1,000 microliters...