Week 3:
University of Iowa Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology

June 18, 2013

I’ve learned a lot this week. Yes, I’ve learned a lot during the other weeks too, but this time it’s a different sort of knowledge. Of course I’ve learned more procedures and tips on how to perform them better. I’m sure that I will continue to learn those things every week. However, the big thing that I learned this week is it’s okay to be wrong and mistakes happen.

Now it may seem like a surprise to some of you that I haven’t realized this. After all, we have been told that since elementary school it seems, but I’m a perfectionist. I want things to work out the first time. I feel like I have failed when things don’t go the way I wanted them to. This made Thursday a fairly stressful day for me. I have been looking at the level of expression of pink1 in trpm7 mutant zebrafish compared to their wildtype siblings. This is done using the qPCR machine, and it takes quite a bit of time to prepare it, run it, and then analyze the data.

My results were too inconsistent, and they were turned out insignificant.

I’ve also worked on making a TH2 and a DCT probe for insitu for later trials with some of the other projects I’m working on.

Those results suggested that they wouldn’t work.

A few other things weren’t turning out right that day too, and I felt frustrated. However, I was then reminded that in scientific papers, they don’t tell you how many times they had to run the experiment to get their results consistently or how many times they made errors. It’s true, and I know at least for me that’s forgotten.

Things improved over the rest of the week. After a bit of tweaking, I got the probes to work, and I am now putting one of them to use. I’m continuing the trials with the qPCR. I haven’t been incredibly successful, but I’ve been trying a couple of different techniques to see if that improves my results. The most recent one seems to be helping so far! I also ran a behavioral test with a recent trial from the nitrofuran and PTU experiment. We had some really interesting results, and I’m excited to see what the next trials show.

When things don’t seem to be working from now on, I’m going to think about what I can try differently instead of instantly getting frustrated…oh and chill out with some RNA at my desk.