S-STEM Scholar Marisa Ostos Blog

This week (Week 2) officially begin my journey intro transformation of  Deinococcus radiodurans  once more. It began with tossing out all of my old plates and broths (both cultured and uncultured), as they were over a month old, and this semester will be a new start with all of the material.  Now, because I am going to be attempting transformation, I first need to make sure I have plasmid to work with. This semester, I will solely be working with the smaller plasmid, pRad1, and will be attempting to use a different extraction kit altogether (which has been said among our lab folk to have a higher yield of plasmid, and which was actually the extraction kit used to pull the plasmid that originally helped our lab mentor Jonathan transform  D.rad ). I started out by creating the following:  100 mL LB + Agar broth  (this will be used to create 4 LB Agar plates with an [Amp] of 50 ug/mL, onto which E. coli with pRad1 from freezeback will first be inoculated) ...

Week 1 and 2 were off to a good start in the lab. During Week 1, the TRAIN lab mentors put on a "Lab Bootcamp" for all students in Dr. Tuohy's lab as a review of the rules and layout, as well as an introduction to some new lab protocols and structure that will be implemented this semester, as the number in students in lab is much larger.  As this was quite an introductory week, there wasn't much that was physically attempted in the lab. Rather, we practiced using micropipettes and overall had a review of how the lab is typically run and what to expect.  On a fun note, I did quite recently happen upon a "fortune" (from an ever-reliable fortune cookie) that gave me hope for the semester and helped it start out on an even better note than it had already:  Maybe it's a sign! Either way, it's time for the semester to begin!