Food included: dumplings, Chinese chips, egg rolls, green tea roll and fresh pumpkin bread.
Yuan invited the lab and some other friends to her place for a dumpling party for Chinese New Year! I've included ~50 photos and several ~30 sec videos of different aspects of the gathering. It was fun! I got to make dumplings for the first time. Everyone had a slightly different style of making them. Erin, Kevin's girlfriend, told the funniest stories. Food included: dumplings, Chinese chips, egg rolls, green tea roll and fresh pumpkin bread. I thought this thing looked like moss!
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My student Sam Druzak working hard!Kevin messing up my plush nucleotides to make them bond wrongI love Kevin's maniacal grin. Sam's Favorite Chair in Rollins -- He had a Furniture-gasm over itHe seriously talked about asking the secretaries if anyone was using this chair and if he could take it home. It was in the hallway in front of a vending machine. Question is - Is the liquid nitrogen tank supposed to be leaking?Don't worry - apparently they do this when they are really full, I was told. This is what happens when Sam tries to figure out how MANY tubes he can fit into one box!We were aliquotting chemically competent cells. >.> I thought this was hilarious. Gotta eat that 5 o'clock fudge!Kevin eating SQUID at International Coffee HourI got this squid on my plate, and it was the most absolutely disgusting thing I've *ever* seen. Kevin immediately demanded that he eat it. He wasn't joking - he really did think it was delicious. Other International Coffee Hour photosPicture that Marika painted during Pi Alpha's guided painting expoA soccer ball has the same pattern as an icosahedral virus, our teacher said, and colored one to prove it.My friend Keon's desk nameplate - I thought it was funnyReally delicious desert Ink and Elm gave Kevin for his birthdayGot everything set out for Sam to run an experiment!Organic nut seller in farmer's market asks that ppl like him on FB!I bought three bags of his nuts for $18 - they are really good! The 1st and 2nd floors in front of Atwood elevators are now firetruck red!Doesn't it make you nervous? LOL Tao, Zheng and Han using the Transmission Electron Microscope!I ordered some HEPES buffer for research!Some E.coli cells that I was transforming some genes intoThe NEW shiny gel electrode cassette holder (I broke old one >.>)Dr. Nathan Lewis from Caltech spoke about cheap, efficient solar energy! He's a wizard!A lot of people came to listen, as you can see. Frozen water fountain in front of Slice and Pint!One of the pre-cast gels that I ran last weekHan washing flasks with Nanopure waterKevin and Kornelia sharing a private jokeAnd that's all for now!Trials and tribulations of January / February researchThe sky has broken open! For the past two months, Jan / Feb, I was really trying to get somewhere in my project and getting exactly nowhere. I thought I was going to have to ditch my old enzyme, as it was too inefficient, and start using a new one, so was working on getting the human species of enzyme expressed. I had two pathways to pursue … 1. Mammalian expression 2. E.coli expression Unfortunately, both of them were blocked. 1. I’ve never done mammalian expression, so was having to read a huge amount to figure it out and getting nowhere. 2. My plasmids were mammalian, so I have to clone the insert into an E.coli vector, and I haven’t “officially” ever done cloning as a grad student. So trying to figure that out was also taking forever. Then, I had a minor stress attack when Khalid called me from Germany to answer some of my emails he hadn’t gotten around to answering. And I suddenly realized, I was winding myself up and self-destructing and had to cut it out. Khalid also – who hadn’t known I was so stressed – suggested a different tack – to make a different RNA substrate and try it out on the enzyme I already had. That way I could work on something I knew how to do while also figuring out the new stuff. And it turns out – THAT has made all the difference. I got my new substrate in finally this past Monday, and my enzyme is unbelievable. My student Sam has nicknamed it “Clark.” It went from 10% activity in an overnight reaction on our old substrate to 100% activity in under an hour on this new one. It also has multi-turnover capacities better than anything I’ve seen reported in literature, even at 4x less enzyme concentration than substrate. It’s incredible! Sam and I were blown away. The results look fake, they are so good. Usually, I have the opposite problem – results being bad. I’ve never had the problem of results looking too good to be true! What does one do in that scenario? LOTS OF CONTROLS. And repeats of the experiments. Moving forward at light speed!We’re going to repeat last week’s experiments this next week. We also have loads of new substrates to order Monday morning and tests to try – because if my enzyme is working so well – the in vitro splice reaction is not far behind! It seems it will likely require lots of optimization but it's SO exciting! It's SO much better to have experiments that you can do, understand and troubleshoot, rather than not knowing what the heck is going on and having no ideas.
My enzyme activity has been a MAJOR bottleneck and was the locus of trouble at my second year report. Having this problem removed is a HUGE leap forward! Actually, this problem (aside from maybe 1-2 others I can see down the road) was really my biggest fear about my project. Now that this works, I have high confidence that the whole project can work once the bugs are worked out. It’s tremendously exciting! So, we’re going to be working like a blizzard next week, both Sam and I, trying to characterize our enzyme on the new substrate and get splicing substrates ordered first thing. Khalid let me order a second gel electrophoresis instrument so we can run more gels at a time. I can’t wait to see what we’ll find! Light speed here we come! The sky has finally cleared! Look for my other posts today to see what other things have been happening in lab. :D Meet Feng Zhang: Revolutionizing gene editing and brain researchA personal hero of mine, Feng Zhang is an associate professor at MIT who is revolutionizing molecular biology techniques related to gene editing and brain research. The following is information that I've compiled on him from several sources, telling more about his life and research. Feng Zhang, Biography / Current Status |
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Rolling Statuses: Technical journal blog. Here you may discover what the daily life of a grad student looks like: day-to-day snippets of life, clutter, rolling statuses and unimportant fluff.
Progress Updates: Will include entries with more meaningful science. Weekly lab report: My write-ups on what I did each week (I posted these publicly during my rotation but not as much now. That may change.) Science StatusHere is a link to collected writing, poster and presentation tips.
As of February 8, 2014 I have officially joined the Salaita lab!! Very exciting. Stay tuned for updates. "Micro Min" category equates to grad school journaling; most of these have moved to my status updates blog under Home tab. See "progress updates" on this blog for more important news.
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