Please, Come Take a Walk in My Shoes.......
In my lab at the Center for Human Genetics under Dr. Ashley Allison Koch, life is quite crazy. I start my day by waking up at about 7:40, rushing through getting ready, to make it to the Howard Hughes classroom by 8:30. Once the group meeting is over, Claire and I take a ten minurte walk to get to our lab across campus. When I first get there, I usually have to put some Taqman plates, which I had made and put on the PCR blocks the day before, on the scanner. Each plate takes the scanner two minutes to run, and then there is some transition time between plates, so depending upon the number of plates I have to run, the scanner can take five to ten minutes or hours. While I wait for the scanner to finish, I usually head downstairs (my lab is actually on the third floor while the scanner and PCR blocks are on the fourth) and either make more plates for more SNPs (I can now make plates for three SNPs at a time) or I can analyze and submit data from plates that I had previously scanned.
Claire and I have about an hour for lunch if we want, so we usually meet with the Howard Hughes class at the LSRC (Levine Science Research Center) café called the Blue Express, go out to lunch with some people from the lab, or just eat packed lunches at the lab. Everyday is slightly different. The rest of the actual working time is spent juggling back-and-forth between making plates, putting them on the PCR blocks, waiting for the scanner to become free, waiting for plates to scan, and nalyzing and submitting data. Sometimes it can feel like a great deal of information to keep track of because every SNP seems to be at a different place in the process, however, as long as I keep current notes about each SNP, I haven’t seemed to have lost myself……………..yet.
Even though the whole process for one SNP is somewhat long and tedious, it is not that difficult. The actual difficult part comes if there is a problem with the plates made for a SNP. The problem only shows up at the end during the analyzing. Then, the problem has to be diagnosed and a solution has tobe thought of. Usually it involves going back to the beginning, re-making plates, and putting them on the PCR blocks at a higher temperature for fewer cycles to help the primers bond to the DNA better.
