Matt Erman, #3; Just Keep Screening, Just Keep Screening

Hi all! Hope everyone is having a great time in their labs and is just having a great summer in general. Week four in the Gitler Lab has been a lot similar to week three, as I am still working on the synthetic analysis screen with the yeast. Since I last blogged, we have mated the deletion library yeast to yeast carrying the plasmids. One the yeast is mated and grows (or doesn't grow), we will be able to see how the yeast reacts to the different plasmids when they are missing certain genes, and whether one of the three plasmids that we are testing is becomes toxic and harmful to the yeast. Hopefully I will be able to have results for the screen next week.

Other than running the screen, I haven't had too much else to do, which is ok since the screen takes up a good amount of time. However, Olivia and I now have some extra help, as Michael, another High School student from San Jose, has just joined the lab after spending three weeks in China. Like myself, Michael also has amazing luck, as when he was in China, he went to kill a bug on a window and ended up putting his arm through the window and needing stitches! I was amazed that he was so strong, but he assured me that the only reason why he was able to do that was because the windows in China are so thin and terrible. This story made me slightly worried to work with Michael, as two people with as such bad luck as us may not make it through the day alive.

Outside the lab I have also been able to have a good time, as I was able to go watch the final of the Women's World Cup in Canada. My sister is a massive womans soccer fan, so when she found out the World Cup would be in Canada a few years ago, she kept pestering my mom to buy her tickets for the game. So when tickets came on sale a little over a year ago, my parents bought tickets for the final in Vancouver for the whole family, and hoped that the US would end up making it to the final. In the end, they did and I was able to fly up to Vancouver to meet my family and fly back to California early Monday morning so I wouldn't miss any work. It was a lot of fun and it was nice to see my family for the first time in almost a month. 

All in all, another good week in the Gitler Lab.