University of Guelph Biochemistry Day 22: A Day in the Lab
This is Dennis from suburban Toronto, currently working on SSP biochemistry. From the lab group “The Polar Bonds”, name inspired by Aquarius and my teammate Kabir (featured in the photo of lab)
Still waking up earlier than my alarm, and still the first arriving at the new dining hall. Our dining place was pushed to the 5th floor as more people came to the campus. Although the options were reduced a lot, the top floor provided a great environment and a gorgeous view of the campus.
Today is a 80% pure lab day. Starting from breakfast, we spent 4 hours straight in the lab to optimize our enzyme specificity test conditions. More than 100 tubes and more pipette tips were used in one day, probably the highest count so far. The reaction of biomol green was very beautiful in the well plates, but the beautiful green color was unfortunately outside of the acceptable range. We tried 4 sets of conditions in the morning. Everyone was exhausted by noon. But the good news was that we could still get Subway (thanks to our SD Mr. A). 
After lunch, we had 2 hours working with Molecular Operating Environment (MOE). We finally started the inhibitor parts of our research after 21 days (which is the major research question of our project). We did a scan of all potential inhibitors. After that, we had another two hours’ lab time with the exact same experiment until dinner. The lab continued after dinner, and we finally figured out the optimized environment for different phosphopeptides after a day of trial and error. The night was rather calm since we would have to leave at 7 AM to Niagara!
Side note: Question of the day was entering the last two weeks and three people were running for champion. The battle was escalated and let’s see who wins the final.
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Dennis Y.
Participant
