Today marks the first day of our third week at Purdue.
After breakfast, we gathered in the lecture room and worked on a class activity focused on analyzing our enzyme assays. Our group was really confused about what to do, so we spent most of our time flipping back and forth between our data. After this hectic class activity, we listened to Dr. Avard talk about enzyme regulation and molecular recognition before heading to eat lunch.
Lab today started at 1:30 and we finished the class activity from this morning with Dr. Avard’s help. Despite an hour and a half of struggling, we eventually managed to make progress. Meanwhile, some groups worked on obtaining the absorbance values for the activity assays from Friday, while others began creating their own protocols for the lab to measure the steady-state kinetic parameters. Initially, we felt quite lost designing the protocols, but after working together and getting help from Dr. Avard and Dr. Keithly, we were able to figure out what we were going to do. Some groups were really efficient and were already starting to test their protocols in the lab, but unfortunately, we had to go eat dinner first.
We returned to the lab after dinner at 7:30 (first time we had a scheduled lab at night) and worked on the calculations. For our group, the calculations took extremely long to complete, but a lot of other groups moved on to pipetting and setting up the wells for the kinetic assays. Everyone seemed exhausted by the end of the lab, which was at 10, and the sky was dark by the time we made our way back to our dorms from CHAS.
Overall, it was an extremely busy and exhausting day, but I learned a lot from struggling through the process of designing our own procedures and calculating the values that are needed.
-Sae
