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!