I'm always surprised whenever I look back on previous entries. They're often surprisingly coherent...which is odd because if you know me, I'm not too coherent. I also have a feeling that this entry might be all over the place, so just bear with me for today.
Today is the Yale Rigaku Symposium which is a one-day conference on x-ray crystallography and work that involves crystallography. This conference was sold to me with two promises. No. 1: Food. I increasingly sympathize with food-scavenging comics posted on PhD comics now that I have to buy and cook my own food all the time. I have to say I might be a chemist but I can only take so many reactions in a day. And the ones involved in preparing food require too much patience and other skills. I think I'd be pretty o.k. in the multi-tasking bit but I'm ready to believe that I just don't have the ability to make food taste really good, no matter how much time I stand in front of a stove. However, I am pretty good at slicing vegetables. As soon as I get my SD card to work, I'll upload some pictures from Stasha and my latest culinary experiment: Gado Gado (looks kind of like this. the brown sauce is peanut butter ginger and really yummy). So, conclusion, free food is always a big plus. No. 2: Hearing Nilay's talk*. He's another inorganic professor who's new this year. His lab is adjacent to ours and I know 3 out of the 4 undergrads in his lab. His presentation was pretty interesting and I found that I could mostly follow along. The post title refers to what Prof. Crabtree said about Nilay. It's pretty funny.
So maybe I should update on lab. I commented last time on how happy I am that I finally started working in a lab. Unfortunately, this week I haven't been too productive and I feel as if I'm wasting other people's time and efforts. At the moment I'm waiting for my protein to dialyze so I can run some UV experiments later today.
Here's a quick summary of what's been going on with my project:
Last week, I worked with my mentor to prepare our desired sea squirt protein. The process ends up being quite bio-centric. We can't order our protein from some provider, so we express it in pichia pastoris, a methylotropic yeast. The yeast grows on dextrose for a few days and then we feed it methanol to activate the production of our protein. Retrieving it is also exhausting. Starting last week and all of this week, we've been working to concentrate our protein solution and then separate it from other impurities. This requires running several separation columns and then gels to verify where our protein is. Of course, I manage to mess up some of my gels, but we have the overall picture. Today, as I said before, I'm letting my protein dialyze in an anion binding buffer so that I can run some UV experiments.
In the meantime, I don't know what to do! Of course there are things to do. I could pour more gels. I could read papers. I could update my notebook. But I always get the feeling that I should be doing something physical for my experiment. Like making solutions (pouring gels is also physical but I did some yesterday and I don't need more than those until maybe late next week).
Skip to some time later...
I'm working on my experiment right now. So I'm busy, but what I'm doing is clicking a mouse every 6-7 minutes after adding an aliquot of anion. So, much dead time just within the experiment.
*I'm a bit paranoid about who could stumble upon this blog. For the most part, I don't care since I'm not posting anything SCANDALOUS (scandal sandal!) but I don't want someone to google a professor and find my site, so I'll avoid using both first and last names in an entry. Juuuust to be safe.
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