Lab day 1 - Thursday, May 14, 2009

This was my first day doing UROPS (Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme is Science). My mentor, Li Zhendong, is a PhD student from China. I've met him 2 days ago and he is a very nice person. He is currently busy with his paper so he doesn't have much time to teach me.

On the first day, he introduce me on how to do micro injection. It is a technique used to introduce a substance to a cell through injection. In my case, it's injecting RNA or Morpholino (a substance which block mRNA from being translated into protein) to Zebrafish's egg yolks.

The technique was not as easy as I thought it would be. I have to prepare my own needle for the injection and ensure that I only inject the substance once, not twice, to every embryo. The machine was controlled with a pedal and for a person who are not used to pedalling (like me.... I haven't passed my driving test yet due to bad pedalling), most of the times the substance was injected twice.

At the end of my first training day, I ended up wasting 5 needles and destroyed some of the embryo. Some of the air bubbles were trapped inside of the needles, making them useless or sometimes I made a blunt opening of the needle... Sigh....

That day, I also revised PCR technique and have smudged bands... T.T.. sigh....