Week 3

It is kind of funny that I have been working three weeks already and I haven't even purified all the protein I need to start my experiments. Who knew separating our one desired protein from the over 2,000 normally expressed in E. coli would be so time-consuming?

Our YjbH protein, which we worked so hard to express and purify, aggregated which means it is now useless. Right now I am attempting to squeeze a little bit more YjbH out of our lysate pellet and I am waiting for my gel to stain as we speak (as I type?).

Next week we're supposed to present some graphs, but I'm afraid that I'm not going to have any data yet. I just found out that there is still one more protein that needs to be purified and that could take all week.
I think I'm confident enough now to try and purify this sucker in just a couple of days, we'll see how it goes.

Thinking of how my research impacts my community, I realized that not a lot of people probably care how B. subtilis responds to environmental oxidants. But I then thought that the more we understand how living organisms deal with oxidants, pollutants, etc. the greater our ability to learn from these methods will be. Perhaps one day someone could utilize B. subtilis' method of thiol homeostasis in rivers or ground soil. I would hope that a scientist's main goal would be to advance our knowledge to better our world through their research.