Pacific Bacterial Genomics July 12th
Hi peeps! I will be taking you through a day in my life 🙂
I started the day around 8:10am which is a bit later than normal so I sadly wasn’t able to get some breakfast in. After getting dressed, brushing my teeth, and putting on sunscreen, I walked to class with my friend Ceci.
We started in the lecture hall today where each of our professors ran through the agenda for the upcoming final week. Afterwards, we went to the lab where people examined their drip plates, not my group though! Let me bring you back to the beginning of week 4. We had performed our PCR and gel electrophoresis where we found that although the PCR had worked, our primer product size was WAYYY too small. I’m talking 169 base pairs. Our group had to redesign our primer products and restart the entire process which set us behind a week of lab.
Today we started our natural transformation process by adding our tDNA into microcentrifuge tubes with a more competent strain of V. natriegens in hopes of our PCR amplified genes to be transformed into the genome of the wild type bacterium. After, we had a 4 hour break before the next step in the procedure.
Throughout the day we returned to the lab multiple times to perform our transformation and in between, I took a nap. From 3-5, Ceci, Alan, Alina, Kaelyn, and I went to Dutch Bros to grab some refreshment during our extended boundaries time. It was my first time and lemme tell you, it was lowkey mid.
Towards the end of the day, my group and I were able to finish our procedure (hooray!). Because it’s Saturday, I then chilled in my room working on bioinformatics work. It was a long
day so I think I’ll sign off now, bye bye!
Shanmei Zeng
Hello peeps! My name is Shanmei and I’m from Concord, New Hampshire. I enjoy listening to music, wandering around bookstores, and studying in coffee shops in my free time. Academics wise, I like learning a little bit of everything with organic chem and Spanish being my favorite classes 🙂
