The curious incident of the melted gel

“Start at the beginning and continue on until you reach the end. Then stop.”

The King in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Or your gel melts. Or your stain focuses into a mysterious spot on the gel, not once, but twice. Or for some other inexplicable and unforeseeable reason, things go wrong. We do manage to solve these problems, but the fact is that they happen even when you do things exactly by the book. (By the way, when I say 'we' I mean Gareth and Chris, his postdoc).

And then there are times when it's down to simple human error. I've messed up seemingly simple procedures more times than I would like to admit. There was the one time when I mistakenly added loading buffer to my whole stock of purified plasmid vectors when I still needed them for ligation. Sigh. Wash, rinse, repeat.

More than a week's gone by now since I started this studentship, and I've been thoroughly enjoying it, don't get me wrong. Mistakes, well, they're a part of life, and we learn from them - that's why I applied for this studentship in the first place. Plus, for every mistake you make, chances are you're doing so many more things right.

To those of you reading this, it'd be great to hear about your experiences (especially the other students). I'm sure we could all use a little encouragement here!

A tube full of joy...

You know you're a science geek when, this:

Or something like this:

leaves you feeling happy and satisfied with the day's work. Over the last couple of days, I've done a number of midipreps to purify plasmid DNA from transformed bacterial cultures; some successful, some not quite so - but that's another story (in case the title didn't give it away, this post is about happy things only). So, after a couple of steps involving centrifugation, cell lysis, filtration, washing, and DNA precipitation, you elute off your plasmids into an Eppendorf tube not unlike the ones in the first picture (which was shamelessly stolen via the wondrous technology that is the internet).

The problem with plasmids, and many other things in molecular biology for that matter, is that you can't distinguish a tube containing a gene conferring the ability to move at light speed and the strength to rub superman's face in the dirt, from another filled with good old sugar solution. This is where the second picture comes in - agarose gels which let you know that your clear, colourless solution actually contains what you were expecting (in my case, pSUPER.GFP plasmids). Or confirm your worst fears that your sample only has the power to induce diabetes if you drink enough of it.

My conclusion? None, really, except maybe to get used to the fact that tubes, bands on gels, and other seemingly inconsequential items will become your source of satisfaction should you go into biological research.

Collect £200

Where better to start than right at 'go'? With not a single hour of previous experience, I have much to be grateful about. My thanks to Gareth and the Biochemical Society, who have so generously allowed me this chance to get a taste of what research in a working lab is like.

Maybe a little preamble would be useful.. I'm a biology undergraduate student at York, currently involved in a studentship between my 2nd and 3rd years looking at one of the components of cell signalling (more details to follow in a later post, maybe?). The plan is that I'll be documenting experiences/thoughts/etc. over these 8 weeks and Gareth will be commenting from a supervisor's point of view. All this blogging stuff is rather new to me, so any comments, questions and suggestions are most welcome! On second thought, do leave a comment - at least then I can get an idea of the (limited) readership of this blog.

p.s. I actually started in the lab last week, so the first few posts may be backdated, heh.