Week 8:
Carver College of Medicine

July 12, 2014

This week I didn’t work on my project at all. I only focused on organizing the lab, since our floors had to be re-waxed (so all the boxes had to be moved from the floor) and we had to buy a lot of supplies as well. I also worked mostly on helping some of the PhD researchers in our lab, running PCRs, gels, transformations, and DNA purification.

It wasn’t a very busy week at all, and so my supervisor showed me how to do some cell culture, since I might need to do that in the next couple of weeks. Because we were able to mutate a couple of our samples with the 3Qs, we now need to insert this DNA – transfection – into cells, so that they can be potentially expressed (in order for us to patch clamp them – record currents in individual ion channels). Dr. Ahern also taught me how to patch clamp (record currents in cell-membrane ion channels), but we’ll be working more on that next week. The reason we patch clamp is so that we can analyze the behavior of membrane sodium channels after mutations were inserted into the gene that encodes these proteins.