It’s weird
how as time goes by, and there’s less of it left, things seem to get more and
more awesome. Specifically, this past week was my last full week of work before
going home for the summer, and it was pretty darn amazing.
It started
out on a high note- my postdoc was giving group meeting on Monday, so she
presented all of the work she’s been doing for the past semester and a half or
so. Her presentation was really good, and it seemed like everything made a
decent amount of sense. She also recognized my work over the summer, and it’s
level of importance to her work, which was nice to hear.
Additionally, we finally figured out why we hadn’t been
seeing any protein all summer (turns out that we weren’t using a high enough
concentration of antibody for it to signal that any protein was there.) So on
Monday, I got back some results that had been running over the weekend, and lo
and behold, there was evidence of what we had been looking for. It was pretty
exciting to see any evidence at all of our protein, even if that evidence came
less than two weeks before I’m leaving for the end of the summer. Of course,
finding our protein meant that I needed to repeat the experiments twice over to
confirm the results. So Monday’s successes lead directly into the rest of the
week’s activities.
Tuesday began by starting the
process of protein preparation, running everything out on a gel, and doing a
Western Blot over again for the nth time this summer (In reality, it’s probably
only about the tenth time... but it feels like a lot). Actually, that was all of Tuesday. Sneak
peek- it’s actually all of the entire week, with some random fun things thrown
in. :P
Wednesday morning, I imaged the
first of the new set of Western Blots, and confirmed that our protein was where
we expected it to be. I continued to check for the loading control (the protein
that should always be expressed, in even amounts in any given type of tissue),
and found that it was where it was expected to be, in even amounts, which more
or less confirmed that the protein samples had been loaded correctly, and I
wasn’t getting totally wacky results about our protein of interest.
On Wednesday afternoon, I had a
meeting with one of the grad students in my lab about what he’s working on.
He’s going to be my supervisor starting in the fall, and it was really cool to
hear about what he’s doing. In really basic terms, he’s trying to develop a
system of markers to tell which proteins in a cell are functioning at a given
time. The way this relates to cancer is that the proteins he’s looking at are
proteins that repair DNA strand breaks- if the proteins aren’t working,
mutations that lead to cancer are more likely to develop. By testing living
cells for whether or not the proteins are functioning, he’s hoping to create a
test that can screen for cancer risk before any cancerous cells actually
develop. It’s a really cool concept, and it fits really well in the trend of
personalized medicine that’s developing right now.
On Thursday, I took the day off to
meet with one of my friends from home who was in Boston for the day. She had a
day’s layover between when she finished her trip and when she needed to fly
home, so we got to spend some time together, which was really awesome,
especially since I hadn’t seen her in over a year. We ended up just walking
around Boston, discussing life and how we had changed over the past few years.
Although it wasn’t some sort of grand adventure, it was wonderful.
On Friday, it was back to work. I
imaged another blot and found evidence of our protein, and got started on some
new protein preparations. It was a little bizarre realizing that the protein
preps on Friday were the last ones I’d be doing for the summer. At the
beginning, it felt like the summer was never going to end... and now all of a
sudden I’m doing ‘last’ things. Time flies, and it only seems to fly faster and
faster.
On Saturday, my friends and I
decided we were going to make a daytrip out of going to watch the Perseid
meteor shower. We wanted to get away from the city lights, so we decided to go
to the Blue Hills Reservation, which is about 15 miles outside of Boston. We
decided to go to dim sum before heading out, which was a lot of fun, and very
filling. We ended up wandering around downtown a bit, and we went to C-mart,
which is kind of like Uwajimaya in Seattle, except a lot cheaper
(non-Seattleites: C-mart and Uwajimaya are Asian food markets, and Uwajimaya is
huge and a lot of fun, but fairly pricy).
After a lot of riding the T and
walking, we found our way into the reservation and wandered around for a bit.
It’s always a bit bizarre to find densely nature-y parts of Massachusetts so
close to Boston. Boston and Seattle are very similar in many regards, but for
some reason I always assume that there’s no nature anywhere around here.
Luckily for me, that assumption is very wrong, and I got to enjoy some
beautiful nature this weekend.
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| The pond we saw when we walked into the reservation |
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| Some of the lovely trees at the reservation |
We came to the decision that the
reservation wasn’t really the best place for watching the meteor shower, so we
ended up just going back to Boston. I really enjoyed being out of the city for
a bit, but it was also really nice to come back to pika for dinner. My roommate
and I ended up getting up at 4 a.m. and going up to the roofdeck to watch the
meteor shower. I only saw two meteors, but it was totally worth it. I can’t
remember ever seeing a meteor before, so it was a fun new experience.
Unsurprisingly, after I got up at 4
in the morning, I decided to sleep in on Sunday. I got up and had breakfast,
and then did the Sunday crossword with a few friends. It was challenging- we
finished the majority of it, but after spending two hours trying to finish it,
we ended up just randomly filling in a couple of letters. Sunday afternoon, a
group of people from the house walked to Inman square and got ice cream at
Christina’s, which is a gourmet ice cream store. It was really good, and a lot
cheaper than Tosci’s, which is where I usually go. It was about twice as far
away as Tosci’s though, so there are pros and cons. Attached to Christina’s ice
cream store, there’s also a spice shop, which was fun to browse. They sell
loose teas and pretty much every spice I can think of, so it was fun to look
around. We also browsed a used bookstore (very dangerous!) and a vintage store
that was playing great blues music. All in all, Sunday was a pretty good day.
That more or less sums up the
week... it’s weird, because this is the last blog post I’ll be writing from
Boston this summer. Next Monday I’ll be home, so there’ll be a lot of Seattle
stuff to talk about, I’m sure. There’ll also be the wrapup from my summer of research,
and we’ll see if anything comes of my last set of Western Blots. Lots to look
forward to! :D
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