Loooong Week

            This week was really, super busy. I somehow managed to work for more than eight hours everyday, and I did something after work for more than half the week. It was exciting, and busy, and at the end of it, I kind of just wanted to take a long nap.

            Anyway, Monday was pretty dull as far as Mondays go. I passaged the cells that we’ve been trying to immortalize, I looked for some more protein, I set up some PCR reactions. I was very efficient (read- constantly busy without any time to sit down and do things on my computer. So actually working all day. It was a long day. (At this point I’m imagining my father making a crack about me finally being a functioning member of society... Love you Dad! :D )) Unfortunately, I slightly overestimated my ability to be efficient and ended up staying about half an hour late to bring everything to a stopping point. I probably should have realized at that point that I’m not as efficient as I thought I was. Unfortunately, it’s not something I realized until pretty much right now. So yeah... it was a long week.

            Tuesday was equally busy, although it was more exciting than Monday had been. We began the process to make a new cell line- pretty much the same thing I’ve been doing since the beginning of the summer. The difference here though, is that instead of immortalizing wild-type cells, we were trying to immortalize knockout cells- cells that lack the gene that encodes our protein of interest.

The point of immortalizing knockout cells this time, rather than wild type cells, lies in the meaning of the terms ‘wild type’ and ‘knockout’. Wild type cells, or organisms, have a normal copy of the gene of interest. The gene encodes the protein of interest normally; basically, a wild type cell, or organism, or gene is one which is unchanged from what you would see in nature- hence the term wild type. In contrast, a knockout version of the same gene/cell/organism is one in which the gene of interest has been manipulated in such a way that it no longer functions- the protein normally encoded by the gene is not expressed, and the way that the cell or organism functions is often changed as a result. With knockout cell lines, researchers can examine what happens in organisms with knockout mutations without having to actually work with the organisms. Knockout cells and organisms also allow researchers to determine the function of a protein of interest. When the protein is not expressed, it can be fairly simple to look at an organism and determine, by process of elimination, what the function of that protein is. The process can obviously be complicated by extenuating factors, but in general the point of creating a knockout version of something is to determine what the function of the missing protein is.

Tuesday was mostly filled up with that. Creating a new cell line requires several hours of sitting in front of a tissue culture hood, moving things from dish to dish and test tube to test tube. Since tissue culture hoods aren’t the most ergonomically designed pieces of equipment, I gained a new understanding for exactly why my postdoc had taken up yoga. I imagine that if you were doing tissue culture work everyday, you would have lots of angry muscles.

Wednesday was a bit different- I was on a tighter schedule, since we (some friends and I) were going to a baseball game in the evening. As a result, I wanted to make sure that my experiments were finished as close to 5 o’clock as possible. One of my favorite parts of baseball games is the National Anthem, and I didn’t want to miss it. I didn’t do too badly- I was pretty efficient, and managed to finish at about five minutes after 5 o’clock. After scarfing down some dinner, I was walking to the Central Square T station with one of my friends who were going to the game when I realized that I had forgotten the tickets in my backpack. So we had to turn around and walk back to her dorm where we had left our bags. From there, it was quicker to walk over the BU bridge, rather than the Harvard bridge, so we decided that we would walk over the BU bridge, and our friends who we were meant to meet in Central Square would meet us at the game.

After various misadventures and a bit of wandering around in the general direction that we needed to go, we all made it to Fenway and sat down to watch the game. After the first few innings, I was pretty convinced that it was going to be the shortest game of my life- the teams made it through five innings in the first hour. The next few innings proved me wrong though, as each team managed to score, and they ended up tied at the bottom of the ninth. They went into overtime, but when no one had scored again by the bottom of the twelfth inning, (which was at about 10:40 pm) we decided it was time to go home and sleep. As it turns out, this was probably a good decision, as the game lasted through 15 innings, and ended at 12:40 am. I felt bad for the players- they all had another game the next night.

It was really cool to go to a baseball game at Fenway, and it was even cooler because the two teams playing were the Mariners and the Red Sox. I had a bit of trouble deciding who to cheer for... and my friend had to keep reminding me that it was probably best not to loudly cheer for the opposing team while sitting amongst a bunch of (slightly to very) drunk Red Sox fans. In the end the Red Sox won, so it didn’t really matter that I was rooting for the Mariners secretly... but I can’t say it wouldn’t have been nice to see them win a game. :)

Me sitting in the stands, before the game started.

Fenway Park!

A picture of the actual game, just so you can see I'm not lying about attending a baseball game. :P

Me with a statue of the Red Sox mascot, Wally the Green Monster (or Monstah, as they say in Boston)

Thursday was my longest day of the week- I severely overestimated my ability to do things in a timely manner and ended up at work until 7 pm. Luckily, I was planning to go to a movie/free food event at 7:30, so I got something to eat pretty soon after I got out of work. The movie we watched was ‘3 Idiots’, and it was good, but strange. First of all, it’s in Hindi and English, with English subtitles. The two languages are intermixed, so I spent a good portion of the movie trying to figure out whether or not my ears had broken. Secondly, the main plotline of the movie is set in an engineering school in India, and it was a bit bizarre to see how similar life in engineering schools on opposite sides of the world can be. Obviously the movie is fictional, and probably portrays a caricature of what life is really like in an engineering school, but there were some salient points that struck home. Most of all though, the movie was a bizarre mix of hilarious and shockingly sad. It switched between the two emotions with very little warning, so watching it was something of an emotional roller coaster. Overall, I would say that it’s a very well done movie, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, although I’m not sure that I would recommend it to people, just because it is a very bizarre film. And it’s almost three hours long. So there’s that as well.

Friday, while still a long day, was less long than Thursday was, primarily because it was broken up into more manageable pieces. The lab had a postdoc visiting who is looking into a position with the lab, so we listened to a presentation about her work and had a lab luncheon, which was delicious. These activities broke up the morning into more manageable pieces, which made Friday seem shorter than it actually was. I still spent almost nine hours at work that day, but it was easier because there were some random activities to break up the day.

Work on Friday mostly consisted of running more Western Blots and freezing down the knockout cells that we had started culturing earlier in the week. Since there’s not nearly enough time left in the summer to immortalize the knockout cells, we basically just passaged them once and then cryogenically preserved them so that whoever wants to use them will be able to bring them up and immortalize them for use. Cryogenics is a pretty cool concept, and not one that I’m very well acquainted with, so I’m excited to learn more about it.

After work on Friday, I went home and ate dinner (we had, among other things, taro fries, which were really good, surprisingly) and then went back to campus to watch a free movie. The movie was ‘Rise of the Guardians’, which is a total kids’ movie, but it was really nice not to watch something intellectual after a long week.

In keeping with that theme, I had a very lazy weekend. I spent most of Saturday and Sunday marathoning a TV show with a friend. The marathon paused for meals, and specifically for dinner each day. On Saturday, pika had a neighborhood barbecue, which turned out to be a lot of fun. We invited our neighbors to come over and we barbecued pretty much every type of food that it’s possible to grill (no, Dad, we didn’t make any cake. You’re still the grill master. :P ). It was really cool to meet the neighbors and hear about their life stories. A lot of them are doing really cool things, and it was fun to hear about life after college.

We stopped our TV marathon for dinner on Sunday because, as I mentioned last week, I cooked for pika. Cooking dinner at pika happens in pairs- a big cook and a little cook. The big cook usually plans the meal and gathers ingredients, and the little cook helps put everything together. Since it was a weekend, and I really wasn’t doing anything important, I (in my capacity as little cook) went with the girl who was big cooking to get ingredients. We bought a lot of things- including four pounds of pasta (to supplement the other 6 pounds we already had at the house) and 5 pineapples. Pineapples are surprisingly heavy for their size. That doesn’t have much to do with my week, but it’s something I realized.

We ended up making a lot of pesto pasta, a three bean salad, and a massive fruit salad. I chopped all five pineapples, which was actually quite a feat, considering I’d never cut a pineapple before. By the last one though, I was actually getting all the skin off without too many of the pokey bits left. And I didn’t hear anyone complaining about being poked in the mouth, so I’m going to go ahead and declare myself a master of cutting pineapples.

Anyway, that’s about it for this week... I know that it’s already Monday, and I could theoretically tell you about today. But this post is already pretty long (to match the long week), so I think I’m going to save it for next week.

Lots of love,

Alycia