I arrived at Stanford around 9 am and met with my PI, Julia, and the lab manager, Anna, I will be working with. There are 3 graduate students in the lab including Anna, one postdoc, one undergrad, and obviously the PI; everyone in the lab is incredibly friendly and welcoming. The people in the Kaltschmidt lab really helped in making me feel at home. While I was a little nervous about living by myself in a foreign city, I feel comfortable asking questions and helping with projects in the lab. On my first day, I saw a mouse get euthanized and decapitated (sorta morbid). This lab is very hands on and it seems as though I will have a lot to do and a lot to learn. After learning a bit about my project in the morning, Anna and I went out for lunch at the Nexus Cafeteria on campus. After lunch, I learned some other things like how to drain the poop out of the guts of a mouse, antibody staining and how to use a confocal microscope, and went back to the apartment around 5 pm. Anna has kept me pretty busy on the first day, fortunately, and we will be jumping right in to her project with genotyping tomorrow. She said that we would be doing a lot of PCR and I would be running a lot of gels so thank you AP bio. All in all, my first day in lab was a little overwhelming, but I am very excited for the remaining two months here.
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...
Exciting to hear that you will have lots of hands on work! Don't worry about feeling overwhelmed - it is a lot to take in and learn - BUT you will assimiliate knowledge very quickly just by doing and asking lots of questions. Looking forward to your next post!
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