As I'm sure you can tell from the title, this was one of the most action-packed days in lab so far. In addition to running two separate projects today, it was also Jalen's birthday, the fourth one since I arrived here in June.
I got right to work when I got in around 8:15, since I had to run a glucose uptake trial. This trial was my first using the glucose strips and meter which I borrowed from Dr. Johannes' lab yesterday. Today's trial used untransfected cells because I wanted to ensure that the glucose strip protocol worked for me before using the expensive plasmids. I placed a very small amount of media on each glucose strip at intervals of one hour, and saw that there was indeed a decrease in glucose concentration of the media, indicating that the cells were taking up glucose as predicted.
In addition to the glucose uptake trial, I also ran a Western blot today. I was looking for levels of glucokinase, an enzyme that is involved in the early steps of glycolysis and helps convert glucose to energy. Therefore, this enzyme is related to the glucose uptake experiment (my original). I transfected cells with the Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) and the *7 plasmid (HBV genome without the HBx protein). My lab focuses on HBV, specifically HBx, so these two plasmids are widely used. If the HBV plasmid changes the levels of a protein while the *7 plasmid has no change, we can infer that HBx is responsible for this change.
In the middle of the glucose uptake trial and while the gels were running, we decided to eat a five-star lunch at Chik-Fil-A for Jalen's birthday. It's a fairly short walk from the lab to the mall where Chik-Fil-A is located, and we made it back in time to check on our experiments.
Tomorrow is the last day for both Jalen and Sidney. Their program will be in Philadelphia until next Friday, but they have to present early next week, and they aren't required to come back into lab after their presentation. We've had a pretty fun time in lab together, so tomorrow is a bit of a bittersweet moment. Since they are both from Texas, we probably won't see each other much after tomorrow, but we made sure to follow each other on Instagram, so I'm sure we'll keep in touch!
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