Geek Boot Camp Days 3 & 4

I know it's only been forty eight hours, but I can't even begin to tell you how full my brain is. When I went to college the first time it was for a degree, I knew a ton about. It was so rare that I would sit in the class and heat something completely novel. Well no problem with that here!!! Being here is a bit like realizing, I have been living in the frame of the house and now the roof and walls are starting to get installed.

This is the second gel electrophoresis that I've run since I got here. I could show you the first one, but it's not anywhere near as interesting as this one. Just in case you've never seen one before, the numbers at the bottom don't really exist. I put them in so that I could reference each of the lanes. Just to give you an idea about how cool it really is. I'm going to show you what it looks like when it's not in UV light. The left is the final product, the middle is what the gel looks like to the naked eye sitting on the machine where I will introduce the UV light, and the right photograph shows the gel with a protective covering over so that when you turn on the UV light, you don't hurt your eyes.

Now, if you had run this experiment, this is what you would learn by looking at the gel. Just in case you're curious, it is experiment #3 and you can read more about it on the first Geek Camp post.

Lanes 1 and 2: there's a reason that these two have such similar banding. They are 5 and 10 µl of mouse liver RNA. I know it looks like just a bright smear with two lines, but this actually tells us a lot. The top line is 4718 nucleotides, long and its name is 28S type RNA. The bottom bright band is rRNA. It is so bright because it makes up about 30% of your cells RNA. These 2 very common types of RNA in your cell show up well. The rest of the smear are the thousands of other types of RNA where there was not enough to make a defined line.

Lane 3 was left blank as a buffer.

Lanes 4 and 9 are 100base pair ladder solution. The reason that these are here is so that we can compare the other samples against this known ladder.

Lane 5: For us this is the big money!!! We were trying to find out whether or not we had managed to amplify through PCR the ttr gene. The reason that we're reasonably certain that we have correctly amplified the correct gene is that it contains 150 base pairs. Look back at the ladder in lane 4. The bottom line indicates 100 base pairs and the second line 200 base pairs. Do you see how the line is in lane?Five falls right between them? This means it's most likely around 150 base pairs.

Lane 6: no we're scientists we don't just guess!!! Could the sample be contaminated? Of course, it can, so we run three lanes to check for accuracy. Lane six has the ttr RNA contaminated with DNA. you can see the contamination in the bright line above the line that is, at the same place as the lane 5 sample. Woot not contaminated with DNA.

Lanes 7 and 8: I won't get into specifics here, but the fact that they're blank is a good sign. We forced lane 7 to be negative by adding no enzyme to catalyze the reaction. Then in lane 8 we added no product, so the enzyme had nothing to catalyze. If either of these had come up positive, we would know that there was a contamination.

Okay, i'm sorry if that was way too much science for some of you, but trust me, I had a great day, and remember, i'm in class for fourteen hours a day!!!

This is where I have classes and labs every day. It's called the Ford Hall, and this building is delightful to study in. If you look straight ahead, you can see the floor to ceiling windows in the atrium, that let in all the right amount of light. Smith college is really dedicated to being green. In fact, right now, they are working to install an enormous geothermal system. So it should be no doubt that the science building would have incredibly interesting methids of power. It has an onsite power system that was designed to provide for most of the building’s electricity needs. It uses fuel cells, biodiesel-fueled microturbines, photovoltaic solar panels, and thermal solar panels to accomplish this feat.

The building also sports a green roof, porous pavement and rain gardens / swails. Because the designers desire to minimize construction impacts on the surrounding environment and a commitment to a sustainability Ford Hall has received a Gold Certification from the LEED Green Building Rating System. It just goes to show that this is the right place for this course.

I thought that I might just tell you a bit about the people who know i'm learning with. This is Lielka. She works in the department of bioengineering, at the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Lima Peru. I mentioned her in my first blog but have only become more impressed, the more I get to know her. In the picture she is using what's called a hockey stick to spread E coli evenly on a petree dish. We've had the opportunity to walk to class together and she's told me a lot more about her remarkable work in skin cancer detection. The amazing thing is, I'm not just learning microbiology, I'm also learning about young scientists and their inovative work.

Spoiler alert... the dorm that I'm in is right next to Hubbard House where Julia Child lived while she was at Smith College in 1934. Rumor has it that it's still haunted by her friendly ghost, so you know, I'll have to make a trip over to let you know.