Amber Shi #Entry 1 First week with virus !

My first week working at Lopez lab was full of excitement and nervousness. Luckily, my thoughtful mentor Lauren wrote me a “Welcome Doc” that consists of all the main techniques I need to be familiar with for working in the lab. The night before starting my lab, I skimmed through all the instructions and felt fairly prepared (not really...) for the lab. My first task in the morning was RNA extraction. At first I was watching Lauren do most of the stuff, trying to jog my memory from the videos I watched. My tasks from that morning varied from aliquoting liquid to using the Nanodrop machine. Even the easiest task---pipetting (which was the main focus of bio tech) made me a bit nervous for the fact that a bit of error may cause the whole experiment to fail.. My main job is helping my mentor Lauren finish her independent project, which is to test the motif of DVG 70-114 and a collaboration with a chem lab to design a vaccine adjuvant. To test the motif of DVG 70-114, we need to make different mutations of DVG-70-114(mainly RNA) and put them into the interactions with different primers. Therefore, the process will be transfection, RNA extraction, reverse transcription and qPCR. The last step is to analyze the data using Prism.

The result of the first qPCR

  The atmosphere of the lab was really good and welcoming. There are only five members in the lab (not including PI and me). One undergraduate (my mentor) and four postdocs. They are very friendly and patient when coming to explain things to me. I very enjoyed the atmosphere because the small size of the lab provides me with attention and one-on-one mentor-ship. Moreover, when my PI is back from the conference, I will be able to have a group meeting with her one to two times a week. I learned  and improved a lot from the first week of studying. I realized the accuracy required by science especially in the field of molecular biology and the way of designing experiment. I became more careful and precise in terms of the mass. As for designing the experiment, I learned the importance of positive and negative control. The qPCR result of last week wasn’t very good as the positive control didn’t show a high yield. Therefore, my mentor and I made several analysis and summarized several reasons that led to the failure. We decided to redo the experiment again with several improvements. The process of redesigning an experiment teaches me the lesson to always keep track of each step during an experiment and pay attention to the detail. Moreover, I also realized that unlike textbook, the way to discover science isn’t a straightforward pathway leading to a result, most of the time it is a process of repetition and finding errors. I also helped with other postdocs with some really interesting 

experiments. For example, once I helped harvest virus from chicken embryo, it was pretty interesting.

   Besides the things in the lab, I also got the chance of going to the epigenetics infection & immunity seminar. It was a really good experience of seeing different work presented by well-known professors and knowing how people in the science field communicate with each other. In joint lab meetings, people from different labs talk about their success and failures and try to combine different ideas into a better solutions. Another exciting thing going on is I finally LEARNED how to cook! I have never cooked by myself before and I enjoyed going grocery shopping and trying new recipes!

 
I am looking forward to the rest of my time here and I hope to do more independent study as I get more familiar with all the techniques.