In the last post I was about tell everyone how I got a third degree burn from making enchiladas and (this is embarrassing because I do microbiology research I should know better) how it got infected and I was out of the lab for three days. Bacteria are no joke. Who knew a tiny burn could make you so sick. It felt like I had the flu. All I did was sleep and I could not use my entire arm because the pain was so bad. Don’t do that kids. At least now I have cool pictures of all the layers of my skin growing back and scarring so that Dr. Huddleston can show her Anatomy classes. Fast forward the summer and the fall semester (I really should have kept up with this blog, whoops) and here we are at my last semester at ACU.
This semester we are welcoming two more new people to the Huddleston research group. Welcome, Sally and Kristen! Now there is total of six people in our lab. This year of research may not be as exciting as last summer when we welcomed two new people to our lab group, the Huddlestons welcomed baby Luke, and I had my near death experience, but we plan on making big progress this semester. We are a lot more focused this semester thanks to the new research class. Five members of the Huddleston lab are now also taking a research class for upper-level biology credit. This allows us to learn new techniques and have lots of a time to work in the lab. We will be attending and presenting at the Undergraduate Research Festival at ACU and at the Texas ASM conference in New Braunfels later in April.
Right now we are working on a way to get our products AB and C to form ABC using the SOE PCR technique. We have made new reagents, ran the DNA out on a gel to make sure it had not degraded, tweaked the PCR protocol, and checked the primers. Next, we plan to increase the concentration of template added to the PCR mix to see if that has any positive outcomes. Once we get the ABC product made we can incorporate it into our Aeromonas cells and get moving on research. You have to be a really patient and meticulous person to get through research sometimes. The roadblocks are discouraging sometimes, but I really want to make a lot a progress this semester. This is all the time I have left!
I plan on working on my complementation vector this week- Sing Song willing- if it doesn’t snow again like it did last week when I was supposed to work on it. The gene of interest has already been ligated into the vector. I just need to transform the vector into E.coli cells to screen them for the recombinant plasmids.
- ACU Biology Research Tutors Kathryn Davis and Madeline Peterson
Another fun thing about this semester is that Dr. Brokaw asked Madeline and I if we wanted to be the first research tutors for the biology department. Every Wednesday and Friday one of us is in the lab to help with lab upkeep and teaching new student researchers the basics of biology research. We teach them how to run PCRs, DNA extractions, and how to run EtBr or SYBR gels. The necessity of lab tutors shows just how much the biology research group has grown in the past couple of years. Yay, biology!