"A Day in the Life (of Will)"
Life in the lab is constantly changing. It is really a great experience that allows me to explore different concepts in the lab. A typical day for me though is, after the morning meeting or seminar, to come to my lab and maybe run a PCR, cleaning or sequencing prep to run in a gel later. While I am waiting for the experiment to finish, I usually do microscopy and clean (via washing) zygospores. This process is probably my least favourite as it is very grueling and takes a lot of concentration (especially when you are doing it for 6 hours!). Using forceps and needles I have to first pick out zygospores from a petri dish (hoping I don’t crush them) and then use the needles and water to wash away and other fungus (such as conidia or mycelium). I have to wash them multiple times to assure that when I plate them only the zygospores can germinate and nothing else will contaminate them. After they are clean I go to the hood and plate the zygospores. This process is harder than the microscopy in that you can hardly see the spores (because I don’t have a microscope!). Before plating them I have to do one quick wash where I just transfer the zygospores through autoclaved water. After that I can plate them (usually 3-4 to a plate) and mark them. After this is my favourite part of this process. Parafilming!!! Idk why I like this part so much. This might just be because I have finished the whole process, or because parafilm is so awesome to play around with!
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The end result of plating the zygospores and parafilm!
In-between steps of plating the spores I usually run other experiments such as PCR cleaning or cloning depending on how the gel turned out. Some times when I get the sequences back I get to analyze them and see how it fits in with the whole big picture and evaluate where we need to run more PCR’s and find places in the loci that we need a better sequence. So as you can see my day is usually pretty filled with stuff to do. This usually keeps it from getting boring, and also gives me a great chance to learn about research.
