S-Stem Scholar Kathleen Corfman's Blog

I can’t believe it’s already week 5! On Tuesday only a few of us were there again, so I helped Stacey with some stuff. I made TGY  media for her, divided the media into 10 different flasks, labeled them, and they were sent off to the autoclave. I’ve actually really enjoyed helping her out with stuff, even if it’s just simple things because I’ve been able to complete the tasks quickly by myself or with a partner. There’s no sitting around taking turns, which makes things take twice or three times as long as they normally would. On Friday, we took a look at the gels we did last Saturday and talked about them. We learned about how to read a gel, how a good gel should look, and what might cause a gel to not turn out right, such as an acid/base reaction caused from using 2 different types of buffers. We also prepared to do gel electrophoresis again for Saturday (earlier today) and learned the calculations for concentration, dye, buffer, and water, and we also prepared to do a plasmid mi...

This week I started out by gram staining a bunch of different kinds of bacteria for Stacey, which were really cool to look at. From what I gathered, these cells are native to Arizona, and Stacey mentioned something about one of them possibly being able to absorb radiation? I think? I wish I wrote it down. Don’t take my word for that! Chad also had a really successful fluorescent gram stain that I got to look at as well. On Friday we we were finally able to do the plasmid mini prep. It was neat, but felt pretty tedious because there was 3 groups of us and we were taking turns. When we were done we used the nanodrop to measure the purity. Mine and my partner’s plasmid measured at a 1.9 in purity ; the ideal number is 1.8. The higher the number, the more RNA that is present. You don’t want lots of RNA! But not bad for a first try. We tried to do gels on Saturday, but the first try was not successful. We got another gel started, and also decided to do the plasmid mini prep again, which was...

This week we were supposed to do the plasmid mini prep on Tuesday. Unfortunately, there was only 2 of us present, because some had to leave for class, so we ended up organizing the dry ingredient cabinet. It was type 2 fun; not really a fun thing to do, but we made it fun... and we were very proud after. 😊 Friday we all realized we had to take a research course and got that done, and when we finished that we prepared some things to do the plasmid mini prep Saturday. Come Saturday, we had everything out and ready. We noticed a mass floating around in the flask that contained our cells, and we weren’t sure if it was a biofilm (a mass of cells) or a fungus. We prayed for the former. We pipetted the solution into tubes to be put in the centrifuge, but we got no pellets. The mass floating in the flask was contamination, and apparently killed all of our cells. Yikes. So we prepared another flask, and we will check it on Tuesday and do the Plasmid Mini Prep then. Since we couldn’t do the min...

Tuesday the 24th was an exciting day, because we got to see the results for our pGLO experiments. As expected, the plate that contained the +pGLO with ampicillin and arabinose was the only plate where the E. coli glowed with a green fluorescence under a black light. It was really cool to see the results of an experiment I did myself. That week we also learned a little more in depth about what was happening in the pGLO experiment and transformation. We also learned about how to read scientific articles, talked about some lab safety, practiced more with pipettes, learned gram staining, got introduced to the plasmid mini prep, and also learned about and created pH buffers. It was a very packed week! 

I’m a bit late posting this, as week one was 2 weeks ago now (September 15-21, 2019). Week one in lab I was introduced to doing DNA transformations. On the 17th, we made the media solution that would be poured into 4 plates. On Friday, we were paired up with someone, and each pair got 4 plates that we poured the LB solution in. 2 plates had -pGLO. One of the -pGLO plates had ampicillin in it. Then the other 2 plates had +pGLO and ampicillin. One of these plates also had arabinose. We also learned about pipettes this week and how to use them. On Saturday we spread the E. coli onto the LB solution so it could grow by Tuesday.