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Eric Week 5: King of Pipetting

Pipetting, such a basic skill, is the one skill that is easy to master, yet easy to mess up. Most of this week consisted of me spending hours of pipetting specific mixtures, supernatants, and RNA/DNA that I certainly used over 1000 pipet tips. I spent this week working on the Subcloning experiment, which contained a few "let sit overnight" steps, so it was not something that I could have done in one day. The procedure, in summary, is that I have to use restriction enzymes to cut out the desired gene (in this case, COX-2) and then treat the vector-plasimd with the same enzymes to "make room" for the insert, and finally to see if it worked by performing a transformation (giving the new plasmid to E. coli bacteria. Unfortunately, I only got one colony (picture is below), but Liz told me that that was enough to sequence to see if it was truly successful. 

 In addition to performing the majority of the subcloning experiment, I worked on preparing my 27 samples for the qPCR that I will use on Monday (first day of the last week). While I was pipetting at my desk, I got the time to talk to many other postdocs and get a more in depth description of the experiments they were conducting and how it is associated with their overall project.

 Towards the end of the week I helped Liz wean some of her mice and I flushed out more wild type hematopoietic stem cells from mice legs, which we eventually be used by Liz. It was nice to see all the baby mice, until I realized I needed to cut a piece of their tail off. I thought that they would scream, but nope, not even a flinch! They would not even notice that the tip of their tail is gone. "They are so evolutionarily, dumb, compared to humans," Damien told me. 

 Fun facts:
Two medical students are now volunteering in the lab, and I was asked to show them the techniques I had learned in my first few weeks.

 Liz has to refill the nitrogen storage of cells, so I got to help her refill the tank and got to see the power liquid nitrogen has when it completely froze the metal tube that was transferring it.





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