It’s blogging time.
Today is lecture day. It’s a nice change of pace from lab day yesterday, where we spent 8:30-5 in the lab and lunch calibrating our beloved chemostats. Instead of dripping milk into broth, today I learned about the mechanisms of FtsZ, the ways to find ancestry through genome mutations, and the fact that if humans are pitted in an evolutionary arms race against bacteria, we stand absolutely zero chance. If bacteria have overcome every challenge through their millions of years of evolutionary existence, they could easily overcome to our measly defenses if challenged enough. At least that’s what I gathered from the lectures. Luckily, we get to observe one small facet of the arms race safely—antibiotic resistance—here as high schoolers building a bioweapon (not really) in our remote desert lab.
Speaking of desert, it rained today!! And it didn’t even reach 100 degrees!! Apparently monsoons are a thing in deserts but I didn’t think I could be caught in the rain here. We got soaked on the way back from dinner. The raindrops felt different from Kentuckian rain: bigger and fatter drops that had heavy impacts. I’ll cherish that feeling because it will probably not rain again for a long time. Unless I really don’t understand monsoons.
The one thing we did do in the lab was figure out that the antibiotic I spent an hour studying was apparently already ineffective against V. natriegens. Darn bacitracin, getting my hopes up. At least it’s better now than later when we’ve started culturing.
No description about SSP life would be complete without mentioning the SSPers themselves. Naming every cool thing that any participant did would take multiple days and webpages, so I’ll just give an example. It started as someone speaking really fast in the morning and that somehow led to a chain of events that resulted in the TAs incorporating “aura” and “rizz” into their vocabularies by the end of the day.
We ended the day filling out our lab notebooks. I feel that by the end of the program, I will have actually properly learned lab technique from the ground up. Hopefully I’ll also know how to build and operate a chemostat from scratch so that I can fulfill my sophomore dreams of evolving plastic eating bacteria in my basement.
That’s about it from me today. Stay tuned for the next blog post from the 2024 NMSU genomics cohort. Hopefully I’ll appear as a cameo at some point in another post.
Me soaked in New Mexican rain.
I can say I have a publication now yay.
