Last Day

My final S.C.O.R.E pots! I almost forgot about it! Right after S.C.O.R.E. Friday I left for Cape Cod and I just got back today. My last day at Cell Signaling was really sad, I didn't want to leave so soon just after I was really starting to get to know everyone! I really did learn so much from my S.C.O.R.E. project, I never thought it would turn out as well as it did. My last day I ran some gels and digested DNA. After that I worked on my notebook some and me and Jennifer organized all of my tubes so she would know where things were in the future. At one point we all went to go get tea and coffee and Jennifer brought out a bunch of pastries that she had brought to share with everyone for my last day. It was sad that it was the last time we were going to do this. While I was eating Linda came up to me and told me that she had found a spot for me to intern for the small time I'm available this summer in the Purification department. It was nice to know that I will definitely be back in a couple months to see everyone again and meet even more new people!

Dry Ice Bomb

I can't believe that tomorrow is the last day of S.C.O.R.E.! I had a very long day today and worked from 9AM to 5AM  in order to try to get as much of my last experiment done as possible. Everything was running smoothly until I ran my gel, only to see that some of the DNA had not been cut during my digests. We ran another gel with separate enzymes to see if there was a problem and things continued to look fishy in certain areas so instead of taking any more risks, Jennifer and I decided that tomorrow we are going to retransform all of my mini-preps I did in my previous round. Since I had to run two gels today I had a lot of down time. Me and the other people within my bay were just sitting around talking about random topics such as what the meaning of science is and other broad questions. Suddenly Tim asked me if I knew what a "dry ice bomb" was. Me being the less-experienced scientist that I am, of course had no idea. I soon learned that a dry ice bomb is simply a piece of dry ice put into a normal 1.5mL microcentrifuge tube, as the ice turns into gas the pressure build up inside the tube until it pops open. Tim and Jennifer told me these are commonly made and rolled under lab benches of unsuspecting scientists to give them a scare while they're working. I was also very clearly warned never to use glass tubes or screw caps in the making of a dry ice bomb...for obvious reasons. It was nice to just goof of for once and take a break from all the science. I really can not believe that tomorrow is my last day! :(

Sequences

This morning I went into Cell Signaling very nervous to start the day. Today I had gotten my clones back and it was the day that I got to check and make sure everything was successful and that all my DNA had the correct mutations on it. I checked the first one...looking good! I was relieved and hoped that since the first one looked good it would be nothing but uphill from here! I opened up the second one to compare and they didn't match up at all. But as I kept going through I was happy to find that all of them matched up expect for 3. This was good news because I only really needed three out of the twenty-four to match up correctly. I could tell Jennifer was very happy we had gotten good results and it made me happy for her to see that I could successfully complete an experiment on my own with the correct results. Only three days left until this is all over! :(

UrbanSpoon

Today was a really relaxing day at Cell Signaling. I spent the day tying up the lose ends of my mutagenesis project by doing another mini-prep, running a gel, and sending my DNA in for sequencing! There was a lot of downtime while we were waiting for things to be done, such as the gel solidifying or our samples running through the gel. My supervisor, Jennifer was telling me about how she has this new Droid phone and doesn't like it because it dies all the time. Well me being a Droid owner as well, was of course willing to help her out and showed her an app that helps perserve the battery on your phone. Once the phone was broken out, there was no stopping. We showed each other different applications that we liked to use all the time. My two favorites that she showed me were the liquid converter (an app the converts liquids to different measurements such as mL and uL) and this really cool food application called UrbanSpoon (Click Here!). It was nice to just chill and talk for a little while, it definitely made me feel a little closer to Jennifer. But as always, the fun had to end in order to finish our science (not that science isn't fun!), and the day came to an end. Only one week left!

Transformation

When I came in today I was happy to find that I actually had cells on my plates! I had used different cells from the last time I plated so I assume thats why it worked out this time. I had to calculate transformation efficiencies for both the old cells I used and the new ones and it turns out the efficiency on the old cells that I used was a little bit lower than it should be, maybe that could have also had an effect on my colonies and prevented them from growing. The day altogether was a very long one, I worked from 9AM to 5PM. Surprisingly it didn't even seem as though it was eight hours. With only one hour long lunch break, the day still seemed to fly by. I'm hoping that's a good sign and shows me that I'm actually truly enjoying what I'm doing. Today when I was leaving I got a little sad that my time here is almost over. Maybe I'll be able to get an internship and come back this summer?

Cells, Cells, and More Cells

I can't believe that there are only two more weeks of SCORE left! It's been going by so quickly I can't believe that everything is almost over. Today one of the people I worked with from packaging last summer came into the bay to say hi to me. It was really nice to catch up with him and see how things have been going over the past year. I had plated cells over the weekend hoping that they would grow into colonies but when I got back on Monday cells had only grown on three out of my eight plates! I was so upset because this was something that I had done before and it had always worked fine for me. But Jennifer reassured me that it was okay when she told me that a lot of times she had also had troubles getting these specific cells to work during mutagenesis. I really thought that I had finally gotten the hang of everything that I had to do around here. All I could do was plate more cells and hope that tomorrow I would see better results!

Site Directed What?

So today I started my new project! It has to do with applying site directed mutagenesis to genes. It involves pretty much the same steps that I did with my last project with the addition of a few extras. I'm finally starting to really get the hang of everything around here and beginning to understand why I do all the steps that I do. I'm also beginning to become a lot closer with the people that I am working with. There's one other person who works in our bay with us named Tim. He's really funny and always lightens the mood and keeps things going. There are two women who work in the bench across from ours named Leah and Taylor. Today during lunch we all sat together and they kept asking me questions about high school, like when my prom and graduation was and what was my SCORE project and paper really all about. It's nice to know that these people are actually interested in getting to know me and know a little bit about my life besides just helping me with my SCORE project. Hopefully I could potentially come back to work here in the future!

Back In Action

It's Thursday night and I have to say that today was a very exhausting day at SCORE. I was sooo tired from Florida and even though I didn't have to go in until the afternoon I just couldn't wait to get back home and go to bed! Since I missed a lot of time from Florida my supervisor had to finish up the last project I was on and then she sent in all my DNA for sequencing. Today we got the results back only to find out that at some point during the experiment we had mixed up the DNA so it was labeled different things! Awesome I thought, messed up again, but it wasn't too big of a deal because we were easily able to sort everything out.  Tomorrow I start my new project that involves mutagenesis. I've never done this before so it should be cool to try something new out! Now I'm off to bed in order to get some rest for tomorrow's adventures! :)

Success.

All hyped up and ready to finally do my mini-preps correctly, I set everything up and began.  As I was doing one step, Jennifer noticed that I didn't mix up my cells well enough. She told me that not fully mixing them up mean that I didn't even open up the DNA so the parts that I didn't want couldn't be cut from the parts of the DNA that I did want. Yet again this proved to me that attention to the detail within the protocols is really the most important part of working in a lab. Sure enough when I went to do my nano-drops all of the DNA samples came out above 200 ng/ul! I was relieved that I had finally done it right and that we could move on to the next and near final stage of our experiment. I'm not exactly sure yet what I'll be doing tomorrow but I don't think it will be anything big since I'm leaving Friday for Florida. It's kind of inconvenient that I have to leave Friday, and I wont even be back into the lab until Thursday, almost a full week! It really delays the experiment and everything that I'm trying to get done, but I know in the end I'll have a blast in Florida and have lots of fun stories to tell everyone when I get back!

Not Again!

So I went in this morning all ready to do my mini-preps and do them successfully this time! I went through each step carefully and slowly, taking time to make sure that I did each step just as it was stated. After taking an abnormally long time to complete my mini-preps I went upstairs to the nano-drop to see if I had a sufficient amount of DNA in each of my tubes. On average, 200ng/ul of DNA is around the lowest you want. I nano-dropped my first tube; 13.8 ng/ul. This isn't looking too good I thought to myself... As I nano-dropped the rest I came to find that all of them were just as low, with the exception of two that were around 180 ng/ul. I was really disappointed in myself and almost scared to go tell Jennifer that I had failed at my mini-preps yet again. I could tell she was a little disappointed as well but didn't seem to be mad about it. I was beginning to get really down on myself, maybe this isn't the right job for me? On the car ride home I though about it a lot; I'm only in high-school! Most people don't start doing this until they're have at least one or two years of a college education under their belt, sometimes even more than that! It made me feel a lot better and I went home ready to finally get things right the next day.

First Day Back

April vacation was a nice break from everything but I was actually pretty excited to get back in CST and continue with my experiments. I only work until Thursday this week because Friday I'm leaving for Florida for DECA internationals! Today I did my second round of minipreps after completing a bunch of other stuff in between. After completing them I ran a gel to see if they were successful and it turns out that the DNA didn't cut! I had no idea what I had done wrong and was very disappointed. Jennifer (my supervisor) told me not to worry about it, that this was science and sometimes things just don't work out and you may not even be able to figure out why. We went back over the procedure together just to make sure I had done everything correctly and I realized that at one point I hadn't let something sit for a full minute when I was supposed to. It just goes to show that you have to play very close attention to detail and follow every step just as it is written or else your experiment won't turn out like you want it to. So feeling sad and unaccomplished I went home at the end of the day ready to do another set of minipreps in the morning. I guess in the future I'll read more carefully!

Casual Friday

Today was a really fun day at work. I did what are called minipreps and they took me a long time but I'm pretty sure I did them right! I got to use this thing cool thing called a nanodrop which measure the amount of DNA in each sample tube. After I had finished my minipreps my supervisor told me about a speaker coming to the atrium to talk about her art. Every couple months at CST (Cell Signaling Technologies) there  is a new artist who comes in and displays some of his or her work. Generally CST will buy a couple of the pieces and hang them up around the hallways and work areas. I was excited to take a break from work and go listen to the person talk. The most exciting part was that when we got there, there was free food! My supervisor and the small group I was with told me our plan was to go in a grab some food and eat it as quickly as possible so we could leave and not have to listen to the speaker. I though this was funny because it reminded me of something I would do. After grabbing from the array of cheeses and other foods up at the front table, we brought our food into a different section of the plant covered atrium until it was time for me to go home.

Keeps Getting Better

As the week has gone on I keep realizing more and more how much I really like working in a lab! I can already tell that this is something I really would actually want to do. It is kind of intimidating when I don't understand something though because I don't want to ask my advisor and have her think that I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm starting to see some of the people around the main atrium area that I worked with last year and it's exciting to talk to them and catch up

First Day

Wednesday was my first real day of SCORE. I'm working in the molecular biology department in Cell Signaling Technologies in Danvers. I learned about all the different steps I'll have to take in order to complete my project, and what the overall purpose of my project was. My job is to culture cells and clone them using a vector. And later ligate them into mammalian cells in order to be expressed. When Jennifer (the scientist im shadowing) explained all of the information and procedures to me it was a little but confusing at first because I didn't know some of the terms, but doing outside research on the things I didn't know cleared a lot up for me. As soon as I got started actually doing work, it became a lot easier for me. It felt really cool because all of the things I had learned about proteins, enzymes, plasmids, and DNA was happening right in front of me. I'm not legally allowed to talk about the exact project I'm doing and the steps that im doing within that. Cell Signaling gave me my own notebook where I have to record all of work and steps I do everyday so they can have hard evidence of what is going on in the lab in case they need it in the future. So far im starting to really get the feel of what being an actual scientist is like!