Waking up at 7:45 after a long night watching fireworks, I groggily rolled out of bed. It’s Friday, and time to run to breakfast.
After running to Ford Dining Hall and grabbing a banana muffin, I rushed to CHAS to get to our 8:30 class activity. As we’ve gained so much lab experience, we didn’t have any lab procedures – we had to make them ourselves!
We decided to run a specificity assay to determine what our enzyme is most attracted to. After a grueling couple hours designing our protocol – calculating protein concentrations, substrates, and creating our own step-by-step process – we were finally ready to step in the lab.
We began by creating a standard curve for our dye, so we could measure how much product our enzyme creates in the actual assay. We labeled 24 test tubes with different substrates in them, and prepared our solutions for running our assay tomorrow. Hopefully it goes well!
Above is a timelapse of our pipetting skills! I was on computer duty for today, so I worked on creating a lab notebook of everything we worked on. My lab mates, Pippin and Olivia, tirelessly worked on pipette duty.
After lab, we headed back to honors north to change for formal dinner. We also wrote some emails to the designer of our research project, and got fascinating responses about the process behind becoming a researcher and designing protocols.
After dinner, it was time for our Friday activity – me and some others stayed up to watch a bad horror movie in the North lobby, and others played Just Dance in the South lobby.
After a long day in lab, I went to bed early. It was another good day at SSP – I’ve met so many amazing people here, and as of today we’re halfway through. It’s only been 3 weeks, but they’ve been the shortest 3 weeks of my life.
-Oliver
