Keeping Track, Week 1

So I have to write a paper (and make an oral presentation) at the end of this semester about what I've done and learned doing undergraduate research. This isn't such a terribly big deal to me, but I definitely need to keep a log of what I've been doing. Granted I have a laboratory notebook for this purpose, but that's a lot of notes and scientific data. This can be in more narrative form.

So Monday I spent most of my time in the lab reading the safety manual and skimming articles about the organism we're working with, Pantoea stewartii stewartii. I also inoculated an overnight culture for the grad student to use the following day. Included in this was actually making the solution in which we're growing the culture and then collecting samples from the freezer stocks. I learned to use the automatic pipetter (love. it.) and just generally worked on lab skills.

Wednesday (yesterday) I continued to learn some basic skills by performing a Mini-Prep plasmid extraction. I'd done them in G&P lab last semester, but never with a filter. I also accidentally spilled one of my cultures, so I wasn't really surprised to see that particular culture reading at almost no DNA content when I used the mass spectrometer at the end of the extraction. I also learned how to use an optical density reading and convert it to the mass of what is in the solution (in this case plasmid DNA).

Other than that, school has been, well, school. We had a lecture in biochem about multitasking (actually pretty interesting), my patho teacher has successfully scared at least 20 people into dropping his class, and toxicology...I can't even determine how I feel about toxicology. It's just a huge blank.