My second week’s been a bit tedious. I finished scoring behavioral
videos way before my postdoc, Giulia, thought I’d be done, which she said was impressive,
but also left her with almost no work for me to do. On the bright side, I’ve
gotten really good at reading literature and grasping main ideas, so I don’t
feel like a complete dunce anymore at meetings and journal clubs. Giulia says
that once my fingerprints get processed through their system, I’ll be
authorized to work on the benches, where I can actually get my hands dirty, so
hopefully that happens soon. On another note, I’ve been getting more time to
explore center city, and had a really great cheese steak last night, but it
kind of went downhill from there, and now I’m really regretting not getting the
taco salad instead.
We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Comments
Post a Comment