I Can't Think of a Crafty Title

So last week was pretty amusing. Everything went better than expected. You see I had accidentally mixed two plasmids together, which could have completely screwed up the week. Luckily, we managed to save the plasmids from the previous vial. Crisis adverted.

Work so far has actually been pretty fun. I know right. Work, fun, the same sentence. The lab that uses the bench across from ours is pretty crazy. But in the good way. The guys there help keep the lab fun. Below is a typical day in the lab with them.



 So as I was saying about the plasmids. Since they were fine, we proceeded to transform them with our bacteria. The process involves injecting the plasmids into the bacteria. Heatshocking the bacteria. Giving the bacteria delicious media to live in. Then shaking them really fast in a bacterial shaker for an hour. After the bacteria has been shaken to perfection, the bacteria can be put into larger tubes with more food in it. But there is a trick with this part. This food is actually laced with drugs that will kill all the bacteria we don't want. Yay bacterial genocide! Those cells shake overnight. The next day the bad bacteria is dead and the bacteria master race is ready to be put into a large prep.

The culprit of bacterial eugenics

I also learned how to use the Plasmid Maxiprep System. It's just like the internet, a series of tubes.

Chinese subtitles are for clarification

So to use this wacky contraption one must first have their bacteria transformed. After a large prep of the bacteria is made the fun can begin. First the bacteria must be pelleted in a centrifuge. While keeping the pellet intact, extract the media from the bottle. Take the pellet and wash it with chemicals such as lysing solution and neutralization solution, you know that stuff under the sink your mom told you not to drink. This process will kill and remove all the cells while keeping the DNA intact. Now, as seen in the picture above, take the clear tube and attach it to the vacuum tube of the blue caterpillar vacuum device. As not seen in the picture above, take the blue tube and stack it on top of the clear tube. Pour your plasmids into each blue tube and wait until the liquid from the blue tube falls into the clear falls into the vacuum. After waiting for a long while, trash the blue tube and begin another exciting wash, cleaning the clear tubes. After your clear tubes are squeaky clean, the plasmids should have accumulated on the cotton sheet at the bottom of the clear tube.  Take the clear tube and place it into a 50mL conical. Fill the conical with 1uL of nuclease free water and spin the conical down for five minutes. Remove it from the centrifuge afterword, leaving it in there will accomplish nothing. Now hold your plasmids high in the air and feel triumphant knowing that you hopefully didn't screw up.

Ah, yes. Work.

I seriously hate blogging. The fact that I'm doing this is even surprising to myself.

Anyway, I started my work at the University of Arizona's Building of Medicine. Well, actually I started two weeks ago, but whatever.

Besides the fact that I wake up early every morning  regretting that I stayed up so late the previous night, I really enjoy working in the lab. From 9 to about 4 everyday, I do SCIENCE. Well, SCIENCE is a bit vague but I'll cover it later in this post.

My work is exactly like this (That's a lie)

So in the lab it's just me and Aparna (My advisor). I am the only person working with her. No one else. Just me. The main focus of our research is to identify hypoxic regions of the tumor and determine if BiP and/or PERK, ATF4 or Nrf2 co-localize with regions of hypoxia and also to determine whether down regulation of BiP and/or PERK enhances the sensitivity of hypoxic regions of tumors to therapy induced cell death. What this all means is that we're looking at the kinases BiP and PERK and lowering the amount of them within tumors to see if the tumors become less resistant to chemo-therapy and radiation treatments. Fun right?

First of all, we need tumors. So we order fertilized chicken eggs, open a centimeter by centimeter square in the shell and inject tumor cells into the the chicken. We then put the chicks back into the incubator and wait a week. Four days before the chicks hatch we sacrifice (Yes "sacrifice is in fact the correct term for this :3) by gently cutting off the top of the shell were the tumor was injected. Then we literally toss the fetus into the trash. Yes, I know, it's very humane.

This would be sorta what I do

Partially relevant

I'll add more to this when I get my interest back. Oh yeah and if there are spelling errors, ヽ(´ー｀)ﾉ I ain't even mad.