Violette stole my title.
Been dreading this blog post - how are we supposed to summarize what our day is like when it's different every day? At worst, my days have been an entire day of doing the same time-consuming thing (like picking colonies of bacteria to use for DNA. SO. MANY. COLONIES). At best, they've been chock-full of only the exciting parts, like getting sequence back, or running gels, or PCR! Those are my favorite days. I love having a lot of different stuff to do and trying to work it into an efficient schedule, so my hands are always moving and I minimize my downtime; it always makes me feel so efficient :D
Since this is only one day in the life, I'll just give you want I'll be doing next time I'm in the lab! I just finished cloning a set of bacteria that had DNA from my plants in them, so now I need to make them sequenceable. Surprisingly, there isn't a red squiggly spell check line under sequenceable.
First thing - prepare the gels! I need 2 small gels and 2 large gels, since I have 200-something samples to run (yes, this was from my entire day of picking colonies). The lab doesn't have that many combs, so I'll make a large gel and a small gel first. These take like 20 minutes to set.
While I'm preparing gels, I can do quick tasks, like going to the refrigerator and checking how many plates I have prepared or going to the incubator to check if the E. coli grew and if the transformation worked. These are really really quickly, so sometimes I'll do them while I'm microwaving (they take less than 30 seconds, I swear!!). But if I'm feeling like a good person who listens perfectly to Kriti/Tanya/Chris's instructions, I'll stand by the microwave and check those things while the agarose is cooling (to cool-enough-to-add-SYBR-safe-dye) :D
If my plates worked, my next priority is picking colonies and lysing them (10 minutes in the PCR machines, which are hopefully open because I forgot to sign up for them yesterday). The plates that are in the incubator right now are re-dos which didn't work the first time. I plated the same transformants again, so they probably won't work this time either... if not, I'll retransform my ligation mix. I think the problem was that I added the SOC media too early, so by the end, my cells were starving and most of them died :(
Then, I need to run my first gel, which by now finished solidifying a long time ago. Filling the wells is going to take me forever, haha. About 15 minutes in, I'll take the lysed bacteria out of the PCR machine and put them back for Standard PCR, and then go back to loading and running the gel.
Then I need to run the first small gel, shouldn't take too long to load.
After I'm done loading and before I need to stop the large gel, I'll prepare my second 2 gels.
Then I take a picture of the large gel using the supercool picture taking machine. I don't really know what it's called... but it reminds me of a superpowered scanner.
Take a picture of the small gel if it's done
Load the other 2 gels
Plate the newly transformed bacteria, if I had to re-transform.
I'll probably get through about half of this list, unfortunately! Days at the lab go by so quickly, it's really not fair :(
OH I FORGOT ONE THING. I GET TO SORT THROUGH MORE SEQUENCES. Most satisfying feeling in the entire world, I love it!
