Monday morning, waking up at 7. Today is the big day, let's see where I will reside for the next 4 months. I look outside my window and it's snowing! Not like tiny snowflakes, but big ones. I eat some cereal and drink some coffee. After one last glance at the route I need to take I go out and grab my bike. Despite the snow, it's actually not that difficult to drive with your bike here. There are pebbles everywhere that give you grip and somehow they keep a lot of the roads snow free (I heard they heat up the big streets so the snow melts, but don't know if it's true). Apparently from the centrum of Uppsala to BMC, it's quit hilly. At a certain moment along the path you need to climb 17 meters in only 700 meters. I can tell you, you need to take a breath after that!
Anyways, finally I arrived at BMC. As I already walked there while I was doing a scenic route, I knew where I had to be. I called my coordinator and she came to the door and welcomed me. Then I had an introduction and we talked a bit, then we went to grab some coffee because we were waiting on 2 other Belgian girls who would also start that day! By the time the introducing part ended it was noon and we grabbed and we got something to eat.
In the afternoon it was already time to get my hands out of my pockets and get to work! We set up a PCR reaction and then we went to the cell culture lab were you need to wear special yellow lab coats to minimize the risk of contamination (See picture at the bottom).
There I watched as my coordinator took care of her cells, and I got to give them a glance through the microscope as well.
The day was already over! I went home and got a good night sleep.
The second day we did a lot of stuff, I won't bother you to much with it but here is a short list:
Agarose gel
PCR cleanup
DNA concentration determination (nanodrop)
New PCR
Making reagents for Western blotting
Despite only having to start at 9 am, I was pretty tired in the evening. So I went to bed early.
Today we continued with the experiment, we cleaned up the second PCR and digested it and then I made a mistake. I made a new agarose gel and I forgot to add the gel-red to it! So I was confident that everything would be fine and I go to take a picture, and I see nothing because the DNA wasn't colored! The worst part: I needed that DNA because we needed to extract it from the gel, and had loaded everything on it for that reason. Luckily I still had "back-up" DNA from the PCR that wasn't digested. So I digested it again, and made a new gel WITH gel-red. At least that's something I won't forget anymore ever! If you know me, when I make a mistake I am kinda mad on myself about it, especially if it's a stupid one like that. But I think it's kinda good that I'm mad about it, because then I make sure I won't do that again.
After almost two hours I was a little afraid to go and take the picture again, but then we got this beautiful result:
We cut out the right bands, and tomorrow we will ligate the right parts to each other!
I also had a quick look on the TIRF (total internal reflection fluorescence microscope) and what a beast that is! I have looked into how it operates and the technique it uses is beautiful. Props to the guy that came up with that!
Anyways, I'm gonna wrap up this post here, whenever I have time I will post some more stuff about the project itself on the labwork page, but that will be some other time!
Bye! (Or as they say in Sweden: Bye!)
(Yeah according to google translate it's the same)
~Cedric
Not totally the same, but kinda the lab coat for cell culture:
