Therefore, I can still call this a Friday lab update!
Having been sick all last week, and still feeling a little under the weather this week, I didn’t accomplish all that much in the lab in terms of experiments. I started back in lab on Tuesday and all I can really say for my first three days back in lab is that I sent some DNA to be sequenced. However, I have big plans for the weekend. Today, I started an immunofluorescence experiment. It’s a long, involved, and complicated experiment which fortunately can be broken up into several days. Today’s part took 13 hours to complete. Tomorrow, I have about 5 hours of work for that experiment at the end of which, I’ll have some slides with yeast cells that will glow green and red and blue under certain wavelengths of light. The next step will be to look at the slides under the microscope and take pictures. Unfortunately, the fancy light bulb for our scope is burned out. And the scope for the neighboring lab is all booked up for Saturday. So, Sunday, I’ll be spending several hours of quality time on the microscope–looking at my yeast cells and taking pictures if they look good.
I’ve also spent some time trying to organize my data into a paper outline. This was both gratifying and frightening. I finally have the first half put together in a way that I think (and my advisor agrees) is solid (that is, it tells a nice story). Unfortunately, the data I already have is not “pretty” enough to include in a publication, so I need to repeat some experiments to try to get nicer pictures. Even more unfortunately, there are gaping holes in the outline that need to be filled in. By that I mean the experiments have been planned and we are reasonably sure of what the results will be, but the experiments have not actually been done yet. That’s a scary place to be right now because there’s always the possibility that the results will be different from what we expect and that will change the scope of the paper.
We will not discuss the second have of the paper. The second half does not have gaping holes. This is because there’s nothing there to have a hole in.
