Week 6:
Carver College of Medicine

June 27, 2014

Week 6. I seriously can’t even believe I’ve been here this long. It’s gone by way too fast. Well, we decided to use this week to give project #1 a last chance. We worked on it all week, trying to change/adjust our protocol in order to insert a mutation into the DNA gene for the protein Nav 1.5 (found primarily in cardiac muscle).  It turns out that we were only to succeed on Friday, when we actually ran a gel and saw that we were able to amplify the DNA strand with the mutations we’ve been trying to insert into it. We still can’t tell for sure that the sequence of the product we obtained is correct, but we’re hopeful that this time it’ll work.

We had to actually give this project a last try because as of next week, we’ll be moving on to a different project. That will be a new project in which we’ll be trying to make multiple mutations, and we’ll be way more busy than what we’ve been so far. I guess I’m kind of scared of what’s to come, since adding multiple mutations requires designing multiple primer sets.

I don’t have much to talk about this week, mostly because we worked on the same thing over and over, but I can definitely say that I’m still learning a lot from the people I work with, and that I’m still having a lot of fun (which is probably why time has just flown by so quickly).