Fun things

The experiment I have been dreading last week turned out excellent!!! I guess it makes a huge difference to have the right kit (against mouse things rather than human…) that isn’t too old… and knowing that the cells that are producing the right stuff is doing so after 1 hour of adding the bacteria and not 2.5 ….

And I can take that any day because I got significant results when I ran the test. I am redoing it today and really hoping that I can repeat it and see the same results in the ELISA tomorrow. Apparently, hope isn’t dead in me. Yey me!

Haven’t told PI about taking vacation yet, will wait another few days, although I think I would feel better if I just said “I’ll be going home for a few days in early January” and then buy the ticket so I don’t end up here without a ticket. On the other hand, really – I couldn’t care less about when I am going “home” seeing it will be a mixture of really bad and boring things to do as well as some nice meetings with friends and family. Mixture as I said.

So, all in all: the last couple of weeks have ended up in having a few different results.

PCRs working, transformations not so much. I’ll give it this week and then I will remake the construct, i.e. flipping the res gene and make it run the same way it should. It shouldn’t make a difference but it might.

Models of the different diseases, one is behaving as planned, the other one is a tad bit hard to interpret.

In vitro stuff, apparently really good!

Thinking and planning an abstract to be sent in to the conference in early January, well… I am thinking about it…

Manuscript writing, not at all. The whole thing is up in the air depending on the results of the four different tests I am running at the moment. Oh, and of that stupid mutant that doesn’t want to work.

Finally, there is a good feeling at the moment. Let’s hope I can keep this for at least a week because I think it would be really good on my self esteem to feel like this.

I'll mention the talk another time but in short; my computer didn't like me so it stalled for the first 20 mins. My PI told me to go to the white board and give the talk anyway while he smooth talked my computer and after an introduction and background on the board the computer gave up and let me access my result slides. All in all, I did a great job of presenting my introduction without any tools apart from my hands and a white board. (It doesn't hurt to be an underdog sometimes.) The result section, well I think it went ok all in all so... another time I will go into more depth how "not to panic when computer hates the new cord to link it with the projector...."

(and then of course, there are always articles like this one that keeps me grounded… pahh… let's hope the research wasn't as extensivve so I can dismiss it.)