Berlin!

That is correct. The reason why I'm posting today is because I will be heading to Berlin for the next five days! I won't have easy access to internet, so that's the major reason why I'm posting today. It will be great to get to go to a city I haven't yet been to (makes it sound like I've been everywhere around Europe, hah), see my family, and get some inspiration from this greta city that I've heard some many good things about!

Anyway, this week has been even more packed than the last. Guess I'm making up for the days I'm going to miss, but all the work we've done has been very positive. On Monday, we did some verification experiments to assure that the genome that was Strawberry. As I said in my last post, the test was positive, which was great news. So, on Tuesday, I assumed my first transformation of the plasmid to do by myself, no help, no one there to look at what I was doing. It was nerve-wracking. I always had the need to ask if what I was doing was right, and I was constantly consulting the protocol that Anne had written me to be sure that I was doing it right. Yeah, I was a nervous wreck, but I did the transformation, then set the bacteria to grow. That took about an hour and a half. During this growth period, I learned that we were going to put samples of the two different bacteria that I transformed through a machine that would measure fluoresence. This would be just another verification that our plasmid had the strawberry genome and was producing red fluorescence. For this, we used the Biomek 3000, which I think is perhaps the most amazing peice of machinery that I've seen to date. The precision with which it works is really awesome to see firsthand, and I had never seen something like that really work on its own. It did take a significant amount of preparation, so it wasn't like there wasn't any work involved. It basically did the dillution solutions for us. These dillutions would allows us to measure the fluorescence in different concentrations of the bacteria, and give us a good idea of what it was (a context). Anyway, we put different volumes (dillutions) of bacteria in the same volume of LB Agar. The smallest volume was ten times smaller than the second to last, which was ten times smaller then the largest. We put this in the machine that measure fluorescences, in the hope that it would grow over night and we could measure the fluorescence produced with the gorwth of the bacteria.
Unfortunately, it did not work. So what we did yesterday was we prepared some new cultures og bacteria so we could put them in the machine again today. Then, I come in today and there had been a missunderstanding in our team, so the machine was taken by Elisa. We performed anyway a quick measurement, and the results that came out weren't good. Since we had no control, when we looked at the measurement of red in the bacteria, we couldn't know for sure whether or not the numbers we got were good enough or if they signified too weak of a presence of red. Funnily enough, since we put in our bacteria with Charles, we noticed that our numbers for green fluorescence were the same as his. Seeing as he's working with green bacteria, that isn't very good news. So now, our certainty that there was definitely the strawberry genome is put somewhat in doubt, and we will be performing another round of verification experiments next week to ensure that we have the right plasmid.
As for the comic, it is coming along pretty well. I am nearly done the writing phase. This part is quite time consuming because you have to write down everything in order to have a reference when you are doing the storyboard. But it has to be done, so I spent a good five, six hours writing. Pretty nice, with John Mayer in my ears. Character development almost done, like always, just because that's the way I am.
Anyway, now I leave you to go dine with my colleagues! See you guys!
Clover