insert intriguing title here

Uh, so, week two... More squishing aphids, more PCR, more gels. Next week I'll be doing something new though. I'm going to be trying a different type of gel, and the process is called DGGE. It involves a polyacrylamide gel that has a gradient of denaturing agent in it, because when you do the PCR, you use these special kind of primers called clamp primers that hold the DNA together at the specific gene of interest, or something to that effect. The grad student I'm working with isn't really that familiar with it and I'm even less so, so I guess we'll both be figuring it out a little more once the time comes to try it out. It's supposed to be really good at seperating bands that are only a few base pairs different. Anyway, I could probably also do a better job of explaining if it wasn't so late, but I kind of wanted to troll for more votes for the duct tape thing while I'm at it... because it's ridiculous how far behind I am now. So yeah, some more votes would be nice...

aphids and duct tape

Hey guys, this is Zoe. First and foremost... some of you guys heard today when I said that I made top 10 for the Stuck at Prom contest (in which participants make their prom attire out of duct tape). So I would really appreciate it if you could vote for me - there's one vote per e-mail PER DAY, so you could vote everyday if you felt so inclined, and you could tell your friends/family too... /hint. Anyway, my entry is number 3981. It doesn't take long. Here's the address:

http://www.stuckatprom.com/contests/prom/entries_finalist.asp

So, I guess that's enough promoting myself... I guess as a bit of an introduction, since people like to talk about themselves, outside of biology I'm really into painting, drawing, sewing, and artistic stuff like that. I also practice kendo, which is Japanese sword fighting, and I watch a lot of anime. I also really like DDR and katamari damacy and some other games, but I'm not really that much of a hardcore gamer. I guess that's enough.

My first week in the lab was pretty interesting. Every other day was kind of better or worse in some ways, but that's probably more because of my mood than anything else. I'm in the mycology lab of the Bio Sci building, but I'm not really working with fungi. I'm studying the endosymbiotic bacteria of aphids - there are primary symbionts called Buchnera that live in the guts of the aphids and provide some essential amino acids for them, and secondary symbionts that not much is known about. Anyway, my lab has a hammock and chili pepper lights, which is the first thing I noticed about it and thought was kind of cool... there are also a lot of nifty mushroom pictures everywhere. I've been doing a lot of PCR and gel electrophoresis and I've had some reading assignments. Other than that there's not really that much else to say, I guess, since we all probably have somewhat similar feelings about this first week, and other people have written quite a bit about it.