Day 15 - "I don't care, throw it away"

Day 15 - "I don't care, throw it away"

There was nothing much to do on that day.

I checked my plate in the morning and there were some colonies growing. However, the colonies were too small so I could not see the color. I have to wait for a few more hours before the colonies are big enough for me to see their color.

After about 3 hours or so, I went back to check and they are ready to be harvested. So I went to the fumehood to do inoculation. However, ZD saw at the LB medium that he gave me the day before. The LB was murky, showing some bacteria growth, which means that I contaminated it somehow. So in the end, I have to ask ZQ and FM for some LB... Sigh... ZD even asked me to measure the OD value of that contaminated LB to show me that the LB has been contaminated.

I had to wait for at least 20 hours before I could proceed with my experiment. So I just hanged around in the lab. The other thing I did was only taking picture of the fish embryo under the microscope. SQ and FM was doing RACE-PCR (Rapid Amplification of cDNA 5'-end) and ZD told me that I could follow what they were doing if I want to but he "don't care". That day I realized that "I don't care" is ZD's favorite and overused phrase. During lunch we were talking about ZD and Yovita told me that ZD's previous favorite phrase during her UROPS time was "What is that?! Throw it away!" I told them that I was wondering how does ZD's girlfriend felt if he had one.

So when we went back to the lab I asked ZD, "Do you have a boyfriend?"... Yeah, I wrongly said that and everyone who heard me laughed, including ZD. He said "It's a secret" then I told everyone, the girlfriend must have felt very sad because I can imagine few scenarios.

Scenario 1
The girlfriend baked a cake for him and he said, "What is that?! Throw it away!"

Scenario 2
The girlfriend bought a new dress, purposely dress up for him and ask for his opion and he said, "I don't care"

Scenario 3 (The worst scenario)
The girlfriend told him, "I am pregnant with yourchild" and he said "I don't care. Throw it away!" OMG....

Day 12 - the Hairy Roes

Day 12 - the Hairy Roes

That day I finally had a very vague idea of what my UROPS project is about

I am doing a research on a gene called VOX and to be honest, I don't have any idea of that gene except that the gene is expressed on stage 13 onwards in the fish embryo. Zhen Dong promised to send me a paper regarding VOX gene but until now I have not received it.

The first thing I have to do was to confirm the sequence of the VOX gene and to do that, there are multiple steps involved. The very first thing I did was to select the Medaka embryo which were already at stage 13 and above.

Medaka roes are very different from Zebrafish roes. While zebrafish's are smooth, medaka roes are hairy. The roes are clustered together with a very fine strands of brown fibre. Although the fibres were very fine and thin, they were very strong. The fastest way to separate them is to wind them around a pair of needle.

After selecting the embryos, I proceed to do a RNA isolation. I did not know what was wrong with me that day, maybe I was just to nervous to start my project, that I made lots of mistake. I forgot to aliquot the trizol reagent to smaller container and I even dropped my tip inside the bottle. I could sense that Yanyan who were there at that time was thinking that I was just a nuisance in the lab.

Foong Mei and Shen Qian had nothing to do so they wanted to join me in my experiment. I gave them some of my fish embryos. I guessed they were too lazy to select the embryo as they just took a bunch of them to the tube.

I did not finish my RNA isolation so I stopped at the washing steps.