Lab Update for Feb. 8

This week I tried planning each day in advance; writing a list of things to do and not going home until I got them all done. As usual when I try this type of thing, I grossly overbooked myself and am now exhausted.  Somehow, I thought it would be a good idea to spend 12 hours a day in lab for 4 out of 5 days.  I was wrong.  Well, it was good in terms of data, but bad in terms of my sanity!

I have added a new page to the blog called Paper Progress which has a very basic outline of the structure of my paper so far.  The first three figures are well-planned in terms of structure, but the layout of last three has not yet been planned, so I didn’t elaborate on them.  As I get the data for each figure, I’ll cross it off my list (I’ve been looking for a widget to do this so I can put it in my sidebar, but so far I have not found anything to my liking).  The titles of the figures in the list are not the titles of the figures in real life.  I have not yet determined how much information about my data I can put on the blog without potentially jeopardizing publication of the final paper.  Some journals would consider my blogging about the data publishing it and therefore refuse to publish my paper on the grounds that it has already been published.  I would prefer to publish in an open access journal that would not give me trouble about such things, but where I publish is not a decision that’s entirely my hands.  So, for now, the descriptions are rather vague.

Mostly, I have been trying to get good images of immunofluorescence data  for Figure 1A.  Because the fluorescence fades after time, if I do not capture good images fairly soon after the experiment is complete, I will have to repeat the experiment.   This week, I did several experiments and then today tried to take pictures of these experiments.  The images are not of the quality that I would like and this cannot be changed by the imaging process, so I need to tweak the experiment.  I’m going to leave that until Monday.

This experiment is a huge pain in the @ss because it requires 12 hours of lab time in one day.  There are very long incubation times and this allows me to do other things during those times.  This included evaluating some of the yeast strains that I created for Figure 2A, prepping DNA to create more yeast strains for Figure 2A, creating the yeast strain for Figure 2B, and optimizing the immunofluorescence procedure for Figure 1B.

I realize this probably sounds like gibberish to most people who are not cell biologists.  Therefore, I’m working on a series of posts about basic concepts and techniques.  The first will be about immunofluorescence, hopefully followed by molecular cloning, and transforming bacteria and yeast.  Stay tuned!