Science is a beautiful thing.

Okay, so the title is a bit ambiguous, but its a straight up fact, especially when you get gratifying results and you prove the infallible machines wrong on top of it. Yes, that's right, I did! This last week has been probably the hardest week of all. I worked six hours a day minimum, but it was lightyears from tiring and uninteresting. The fact of being around my colleagues who enjoy helping me and make the lab a fun and bright place to work in definitely helps too!

Around the end of last week, we had discerned that the Dna that we had tried to fabricate (the GFP plasmid and strawberry genome plasmid) had not worked. The machine that measures the concentration of Dna had given us a big fat 0, which means there is nothing. Mystified, we spent a good three days trying to figure out whether or not it had work, and we even went through the great lengths of doing the entire experiment again (that was a bit frustrating, I must say). The maddening aspect of this part was that we had recieved positive test for every part of the experiment, and then the machine crushed our hopes. Anyway, we decided to transform our non-existent Dna into some bacteria anyway to see if it had worked. Well, it worked! I tell you, it made my day. We had put some of the bacteria we had grown in culture on some plates with some antibiotics to make sure that they had absorbed the correct plasmid, and, lo and behold, we had bacteria. This was a good sign, because that meant that there was a very good chance that we had the bacteria that absorbed the right plasmid with the strawberry genome. I even swear to you that they had a reddish tinge to them, and though I do swear by it, my colleague, especially Charles, would disagree. I even used the excuse that I had glasses and they didn't, but that point became mute when Charles pointed at his own. So, anyway, we purified the Dna from these tow cultures of bacteria, and we amplified it through... PCR! We then took part of that Dna and transpormed it into six cultures of bacteria. Each culture was a different type of bcteria, and the reason we did this is because, if my plasmid really works, they would like to have samples of it for future use. We would also use these bacteria to purify the Dna once again, and place it into the next set of bacteria that we will use for the growth competition.
That is what I did this week. It may not sound like a lot of work, but it is quite time consuming. Apart from spending time in the lab, I made progress with the storyboard, and the writing portion is nearly done. I've begun sketching the beginnings of the actual storyboard, and it is as exciting as doing a gel electrophoresis! It is there in my head, like a vision, and as my hand moves across the paper, that vision becmoes a reality. Or nearly, because I'm not so good as to be able to perfectly draw everything that I envision. But, I am quite excited to finally get down to what I love: drawing!
An excerpt from Friday evening: My uncle invited me to a jam session where players come and anyone can play, even me, if I wanted to, and everyone gets to enjoy amazing jazz music. Though it started at midnight, and went until 2, every minute was electric, and these people were exactly the sort of people that inspire me to pursue music and make me want to travel the world. It helps that they were crazy musicians on top of it. In short, it blew my mind.
So, that'll be all for the moment. Peace, my friends!
Clover