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As for the last week in lab I amplified and isolated the 332 base pair region in 28S Katablepharis in the Columbia River estuary differs from 28S Katablepharis japonica. This process is just to insure that this frame is real and it is not a misread on the sequence. I'm a little bummed that I didnt get to do real time PCR but thats the nature of experiments sometimes. I will be interested to see the future outcomes of the project.

Longest introduction to the Picture of the Week:

This was the final week of my internship (so sad!).  I wrapped up some various lab work, still not figuring out the problem with my PCRs.  I also was working on my poster and presentation, getting them ready for the Symposium that was on Friday.

 Coming to CMOP on Monday was different than usual. The building was quiet and the intern office is empty - except for me. It is a bit lonely without the other interns who I have gotten to know and like the past couple months. I do have much more room to spread my stuff out in the office though:

As I sit at my desk for the last 25 minutes of my time here at CMOP, I look back on what has been an amazing summer. (Well, really I'm looking out the window, but in my mind I'm looking back.) The sticky notes that covered every surface of my desk are gone, along with my little orchid.

8/9/10:  My NTS PCR that I did on Friday had been in the fridge for the whole weekend, so I ran it on a gel right away.  I got very peculiar results back - all of my samples were “streaking”, or creating long bands that span the length of the gel.  To be sure it wasn’t the electrophoresis set-up, I cleaned it thoroughly and re-ran the gel, only to get the same reults.  I went even further by throwing out our loading dye (a chemical used to make the PCR samples sink into the wells) and our 1X TAE (used for making the gel and acting as a conductor).  Af

 The last few days of this internship, I pondered and proffered my paper and presentation of my products. I proceed to progress from Portland to Pullman where I'll purposefully peruse over passages of text to prepare for proving my
potential to a plethura of professors.

      Pictured is the product of my python pilgrimage.

With week eight of my time at CMOP done, I have finally come to a firm conclusion. Platinum is the most effective surface modification. Over an average of three trials, platinum, while using hexachloroplatinic acid as the photodeposition reagent, produced 92 percent better degradation rate. Although I am not certain on why the acidic deposition reagent works better than the salt reagent, I hypothesize it is due to a change in pH, and plan to investigate it next week.

 Wow that last week went really fast. Using the new 28S primers I developed, I finally got the right product for the 28S region. We received the sequences on friday and running through the NCBI Blast program confirmed a match to Katablepharis 28S. Now we have about 2/3 of the 28S sequenceBefore the Primate Center closed on Friday I rushed over some samples to be sequenced with more primers. Hopefully we can get that whole sequence next week.

Hey, my blog title rhymes. You mad that i'm writing this in no time? So sublime, are my freestyle skills, in the meanwhile will you all hold still as I bust out these multisyllabic rhymes which make your head dizzy like after a climb. Rappin on stream of consciousness, dont mean to be raunchy 'n s***, just relax and drink donkey piss.

(Joking....joking....)

Last night I succumbed to a sudden bout of uncharacteristic sentimentalism.  With my internship was drawing to an end, I had a sudden urge to learn Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) by Greenday on guitar at 1 AM.  As I was strummed and sang, my brain automatically translated some of the lyrics into Matlab code.  This is gonna sound lame, but it demonstrates how far Matlab has merged with my psyche.

It's something unpredictable
But in the end it's right
I hope you had the time of your life