A highlight of my time during the Fred Hutch Explorers program were the labs we did. I found it extremely difficult to pick a single lab as all of them were fun and both of my lab partners were amazing people. If I had to pick one though, it'd be the final lab. It was the perfect conclusion to our time in the lab as it was a culmination of everything we had done thus far during our time here. We used our pipetting skills we developed throughout the 2 weeks, starting from August 13th with our micropipetting practice. We also did gel electrophoresis and we got to make our own gels, which we had learned how to do on August 20th. Unfortunately we did not have enough time to run a PCR, so we used prepared samples in our gel electrophoresis.
Our procedure went as follows:
We first made 4 mock blood sample microtube with a piece of paper with some food coloring and 100 microliters of rehydration solution each tube (which I'm 90% sure was just water).
Everyone then added their "blood samples" to a well plate and "sent it to a lab for processing."
Next, we prepared our gel electrophoresis. We added .15g of agarose powder and 15ml of 1X TAE in an erlenmeyer flask and microwaved until it was simmering, just about time boil, making to swirl it periodically during the heating process to make sure the agarose powder dissolved correctly. We then waited for it to cool a bit, added sybrsafe, mixed it and poured it into the gel casting tray for the gel to congeal. After waiting about 15 minutes, we very carefully removed it from the casting tray, and put it in the chamber, filled it with 0.5X TAE, and placed it into the gel box. We added 2 microliters of loading dye to all our samples except the DNA Ladder. We then added 8 microliters of the DNA ladder along with 10 microliters of each of our controls and patient samples in different wells in our gel, powered it on and waited. There were a couple hiccups, like me using the wrong amount of 1X TAE or the gel box not turning on, every one of our labs had a couple hiccups, but we always managed and it usually ended up going well. I wouldn't have made it far without my labmate, Sheila, so I'd like to thank her for being my lab partner for the past week. Overall, I had lots of fun during my time here, made tons of new friends and got to learn a lot, and my only regret was the program not being longer.
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