Week 7:
Carver College of Medicine

July 5, 2014

This week went by way too fast. It was actually kind of slow in the lab since I didn’t start working on the new project. We have a researcher from Chile working with us and he’s under a time limit, and so we have been helping him with his research.

So, basically, I worked on minis and maxis this week (purification of plasmid DNA -vectors- from bacteria). Minis and maxis are pretty much the same thing, except that in a maxi you grow a lot more bacteria than in a mini, therefore you end up with a lot more DNA to work with.  The whole process of inserting plasmid DNA into bacteria is called ‘cloning’. Plasmids contain genes that make cells resistant to a certain antibiotic (in our case, carbenicillin), plus the genes one is studying. Therefore, when the plasmids are inserted into bacteria (transformation), the bacteria are exposed to the antibiotic (added to the media) and only the bacteria that took up copies of the plasmid will survive and replicate (replicating the plasmid with it). The whole process of purification of plasmid DNA can take a while if you’re working with maxis preps, like maybe an hour and a half. If you’re working with minis, then it doesn’t take that long. Also, it depends on how many samples you have. I’ve had weeks where I worked on 20 minis at the same time, then that took a while.

I don’t have a lot to share this week, since it was actually pretty slow. However, I am pretty happy that Brazil went to the next round in the World Cup, even though our best player got injured and won’t be playing anymore. Oh well, we’ll need to try to win without him. Also, yesterday I went downtown Iowa City (the 4th of July), there was literally no one up there. I feel like people just want to get out of here whenever they have the chance. I thought there was gonna be a parade and stuff..not really. It was a good holiday though, and again, a very good week.