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Assay Assay Assay!!! (week 8)

This has been a LONG week! Most days I was in the lab from about 8:30am to around 7:30pm (give or take an hour). Thus it was almost a 60hr week, and I am exhausted! Good thing though is that I am done with all my assays. All I have left for lab work next week is to finish the reaction on my last assay. Then I will be focusing on preparing my data and final presentation. Fingers crossed that my data lines up and is clean!

From what I have seen so far though, pretty much every assay (except the awesome 1st deletion assay) has had at least one mutant which hasn’t yielded greatly consistent results. Thus on the last two days of this week, I have been rerunning some of those assays in the hopes of getting more consistent data. Thursday’s assay has shown to be very good, and did give me a lot of good results with which I can use. Hopefully the one I ran today will also yield good news when I do the reaction next Monday. 

It should probably be said, however, that these assays are LONG, and very tiring to run. Due to a combination of them taking around 1.5 hours to set up, 2.5 hours to incubate up to a measurable amount on the spectrometer, and then on average of seven time trials (spaced by an hour), they all together make for at least a 10 hour day. Then when I add on the two hours it takes for me to get to and from here, I am VERY tired when I get home and VERY tired when I wake up six hours later. I am extremely excited that I don’t have to run another assay next week (assuming my data is good). 

Also this week, we had an assessment focus group to discuss our experiences here at CMOP this summer. I don’t want to go too much into it since we were supposed to be confidential with what was said there, but it definitely was very interesting hearing about everyone’s experiences (good and bad) this summer. It probably could have been timed a little better for me, since I was exhausted that day after a weekend attending my extended family reunion and then redoing my bedroom the night before at the behest of my girlfriend (We went to a lot of stores and bought end tables & a dresser, and I got to build both end tables before going to bed). Also, I was extremely hungry since I didn’t eat lunch before I went to the meeting and was drooling over what Annie was eating for lunch while we were there (cheetos dipped into some sort of noodle dish, odd but I was so hungry I would have eaten anything). So, I hope I was more positive than negative, since I have had many awesome experiences this summer (though my tired and food starved brain may not have been in a good place to relate all of them). 

All in all, it was a very productive week, and I am extremely excited to have all my data next week so I can begin to start drawing some conclusions.