Monday, January 16, 2012

Like night and day

Much to my surprise and delight (at least to the extent that I can be "delighted" about anything), this semester has been as good as last semester was bad. I'm really not sure what has made the difference. The master's student decided to switch to non-thesis, so he's no longer in the IM department. This means that I'm still alone in my classes - particularly in my Microbial Pathogenesis class, where I am the only student. Once a week, I meet the professor in his or her office for a two-hour lecture. There's no book and no exams, but I have weekly assignments to complete. This week, I have to describe (in detail) the process of type III secretion, the in vitro experiments I would use to demonstrate the presence of one, as well as the molecular methods I would employ to do so. I'm taking a break from sifting through decades of primary literature on secretion systems to write this blog post.

I am excited about my new lab rotation. Now that I think about it, maybe that's the difference that makes this semester better. Even Chris says that it's nice not to see me so depressed and threatening to quit school and get a job at McDonald's. I'm working in a virology lab, where the focus is on proteins involved in HIV replication in host cells. So far, in the three days I've been there, I've done a successful transformation, induced protein expression using IPTG (thank you, TargeTron!), seen how a Western blot is done, observed some cell culture work, and I even got my very own 293-T cells to take care of! The PI would like me to do some gel shifts to see if a protein, NKLAM, binds RNA. There are only 5 papers in the PubMed database on this particular protein, so if I get some results on the gel shifts, it could be publishable. SO AWESOME!!

I need to get back to work, but I just felt compelled to write something - especially since things are going well right now. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to write some more later this week.

1 comment:

  1. I think watching Gremlins made the difference.

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