>Hey Hey,
TFIFFFF! I kinda feel bad for saying that considering I just had almost 1 week off from our two snowstorms. But hey, it’s the weekend!
This morning I woke up cold, tired, and staaaarving. To fix this I made PB and Banana Protein oats:
After a skipped morning workout (due to a bellyache, boo), I managed to make it to lab despite falling asleep on the metro and almost missing my stop. Don’t think I haven’t done that before. Twice.
Today’s experiment went much better than yesterday’s. I am currently making antibodies to use as drugs for the treatment of leukemia. Antibodies are proteins (made of amino acids). Protein engineering can be very difficult at times, and this was the case for one I’ve been working on. Today however, I managed to generate enough material to do several exciting experiments in the next couple of weeks. Perdy stoked ova here 😉
SciFact: To visually determine how much antibody I’ve made (and its quality), we input the protein into a porous material (called a gel), and apply a chemical that makes the protein negatively charged. When voltage is applied, the protein (now charged), travels through the gel according to its size. The larger the protein, the slower it moves.
Next I apply a dye that only stains protein (not DNA, RNA, etc.):
Neat???
Anywhoooo that’s enough science class for today, ha. After the exciting results from that experiment came in, I headed off to lunch in the cafeteria (I usually bring my lunch to save moola). I had a glorious salad:
Not too shabby for a cafeteria salad, eh?
After lunch I was craving a tea and dessert. I usually don’t eat stuff like this because I try to follow a ‘clean’ diet but these had my name all over them:
Well I’m off to a lecture then happy hour to bid farewell to another grad student in my lab that’s returning to Germany. We’ll miss you Dennis!
Have a great night!!!!
Lauren