Happy July 4th everybody! Somebody was feeling extra patriotic today 😉
This is Ms. Alexa, one of our TAs.
We had gotten in pretty late last night from the baseball game, so we were all pretty tired (at least I was, there are some freaks of nature among us who can run optimally on 5 hours of sleep). Since it’s Independence Day, the TAOS dining hall where we normally eat was closed. Instead we ate in the Pete V. Domenici Hall, where the Astro kids usually get their lectures instead.
Apparently it’s named after some New Mexican senator.
We all headed over to Foster Building, and went to lab, where we all got suited up, but it turns out we were supposed to go to lecture hall, so we were about 5 minutes late, haha.
In the morning, we had a lecture with Dr. Duffy (pictured below) on gel electrophoresis and how to clean up our PCR products, then we went and actually did said things in the lab.
Yesterday, we had done PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) to amplify DNA (make lots of copies of it), and today we were going to use it in the electrophoresis and then purify it. It’s the thing that the police use to get a lot of DNA from small bits left at crime scenes.
Gel electrophoresis is where you stick some DNA in a sheet of agarose gel, and then run an electric current through it. The negative DNA wants to run towards the positive side, but they begin to separate based on the size of the DNA fragments. The lightest DNA pieces can travel the furthest, while the heaviest travel the least, forming this banding pattern:
Afterwards, we had to purify the remaining PCR product, since it probably still had a bunch of salts and primers and junk mixed into it. So we caught all the DNA in a silicon filter, and flushed it with a buncho buffers and wash solutions and…things. At the end, we used something called an “elution” buffer that took out the DNA from the filter, leaving us with some nice DNA water.
You might know, but we got split into groups of three: meet the lab groups (names are left to right) –
(Mildly) Midwest Mutants – Vicky, Ritisha, Douglas
Bacilli Genes – Eva, Arion, June
Penichillin’ – Klara, Ryan (unfortunately passed away), Lucas
Fanum Taxonomy – Vageesh, Chloe, Angelina
Team MEH – Emily, Michael, Hugo
Naturally Selected – Sarah, Kano, Jude
Streakers – Arthur, Sierra, Hiram
W. rizz – Brett, Delilah, Maahi
At around 12:30, we went to go get lunch at Domenici again, where we had some suspicious looking sandwiches that actually tasted pretty good. Because our schedule was off thanks to Independence Day, I got to stay and spy on the Astro lecture.
After hurrying back to Foster, we got bombarded with three lectures in a row. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad, since some of it was review from bio classes. The topics were on cell structure, macromolecules, and modes of antibiotic resistance, given by Dr. Messner and Dr. Catalán (pictured down below respectively).
Afterwards, we got some time to work with our chemostats, and our group (Bacilli Genes) finally managed to set up our experiment after a ton of re-autoclaving (an autoclave is just a giant pressure cooker that kills all the bacteria, so we can start without contamination).
Arion here is going to be writing the next blog, so look forward for that!
Again, we had dinner in Domenici, with all the Astro kids, which is pretty rare since the programs are usually quite separated. We had some patriotic brisket, pulled pork, and… I think it’s turkey. It was also a girl named Jacqueline’s birthday. I think she’s in the Astro program, but thanks to her we got a bunch of cake! Ahhh… to be young and sprightly.
We had a little downtime between dinner and fireworks. The TAs were nice to us, and pushed the due date for our problem set (PSet) back one day, since we didn’t have enough time to work on it that night. We all walked down to the big lot at 9:00 where a ton of people were already waiting to see the fireworks, which started at 9:45. There were people singing on a stage in the distance, and everybody was taking a LOT of pictures:
Two of our TAs: Mr. Joey and Ms. Ceilidh!
Another of our TAs: Mr. Shakil!!
You can take a look at the fireworks finale here : I had to delete multiple apps from my phone, and it won’t let me upload the whole show to youtube, because I kept running out of storage space 😭 We made it back to the dorms around 10:20ish, which is past our normal room check time at 10:00, and we were all so exhausted. We had gotten back late the previous day as well from the baseball game. Then, I very ceremoniously conked out at around 11:00ish and something. So concluded the day…
-June Park 🙂
