Results! – Very time consuming though… (Week 7)

I am finally generating my final data! Every day I am running LacZ assays & reactions in an effort to gather the data from four independent strains for each of my 16 mutants by the end of next week (aka 64 runs). Thus, I am running eight at a time for the next two weeks. This is extremely time consuming since the assays take around 8 hours (sometimes longer) to run and the reaction takes about two hours (which ideally can be ran concurrently with the assay in the same day). Thus, this week has found me working in the lab from around 8am to 7pm (which when my two hour commute is taken into account has me away from home for upwards of 15 hours!). So yeah, I’ve been very tired all week. I am excited though to finally be generating data to show for all the work I have put into this project.

As of yet, the data has been fairly good on the whole. Some runs may need to be redone since I had difficulty running the reaction consistently during the beginning of this week when it was still new to me. The reaction is pretty hard since you have about 20 seconds between each major step in which to do about 15 seconds worth of work, so there is not a lot of time for error or thinking. It is satisfying though to see something happen quickly for once (pretty much everything I have done during this internship has been a SLOW process). I have almost completed half of my runs and should be done with half by Monday. I am hopeful to finish all of them by next Friday, but may have to spill a little bit of the work over to the following week (especially if I have to repeat a lot of the runs due to errors – though for the most part I shouldn’t have to redo too many of them). Keeping my fingers crossed and I am excited to be getting to the conclusion of my project.

Also this week, I watched four of my fellow interns do their final presentations. This was interesting cause I got to see just what some of my fellows were up to this whole time, and it appeared that they were all up to A LOT :). Also, it gave me some ideas about how I should present my data in two weeks.