Matt Erman #2; So Many Pipette Tips!

I cannot believe that half of my time in the lab is already over. It feels like yesterday that I was contemplating on going to the hospital with an allergic reaction. 

One of the main things that I have been doing in the lab is assisting many of the lab members with what they have to do, as Matt has not been to busy as he is still working on his thesis and interviewing at other labs. Lately, I have been working with Nick, another grad student, who asked me to help him with a few projects. The first one that he asked me to help with was to help him remake the yeast deletion library the lab has (Yeast have many genes that are unessential for survival of the yeast, but may play a role in different functions of the yeast. The lab tests different human genes that may cause ALS in the yeast cells and sees how they interact). Since the deletion library was almost three years old, and every time yeast is thawed it progressively becomes less and less viable, Nick and others in the lab thought it would be a good idea for me and Oliva, the undergrad from Penn, to remake the library using the yeast from the old one. To do this, we were able to use some very expensive and fancy machinery. One machine would pipette the yeast into a 96 well plate, and the other machine would put the yeast onto gels. The plates would be saved as the new library, and froze at -80 degrees Celsius. The gels are for the next experiment that Nick wants us to do, crossing some of the deletion library with yeast cells with specific deletions that relate to Nick's project.

This is the Pipette Machine in action. Look at all the Pipettes! We had to do it 52 times, and each time we needed to use a new container of pipettes. We went through around $1,000 in pipettes, just in recreating the deletion library, and another 52 boxes for adding glycerol to each of the wells (glycerol allows for the yeast to freeze without crystallizing in the -80).

Here is the machine that transferred the yeast onto the gels. It is an extremely intricate machine, as once you put the plates in the machine, the machine does everything for you, including take the lids off the plates, and place the yeast on the gel.

Little yeast colonies on the gel plate.

Other than working in the lab, I have also been trying to do a good amount of exploring the area. On Sunday, I decided to go into San Francisco for the day. The only problem was that so did almost everyone else in Palo Alto, so I ended up not being able to get onto the train into the city, and had to wait an hour for the next train. Once in the city, I was able to walk around the crazy city, as Sunday was the day of the Pride Parade, and it felt like there was hundreds of thousands of people, just partying! It was crazy!

Hope everyone is having a great time in their labs and has a great Fourth of July!