Today’s work was rather time intensive. Despite working through lunch, and every other available hour, not a lot of things were actually finished, which I suppose showed me that lab work is something that requires patience. From the time that I arrived to the time that I left, Porsha and I worked on creating a protein quantification assay- a thorough process that ends up isolating the protein- AMPK in this case- in order to determine the concentration of each sample.
Dr. Rob also taught me how to pipette first thing in the morning, so I was much more involved today than I was yesterday, helping Porsha in measuring and diluting the 36 wells that we prepared.
After preparing the wells with a reworking agent (the blue-green liquid above), the tray was incubated at 37 degrees celcius in order to isolate the protein, the concentration of which is shown by the shade of violet (look at the last two rows of wells). Unfortunately, I forgot to put the reworking agent in two of the rows before the first incubation, so our process was somewhat extended because of that, but as Porsha told me “It’s lab- everyone makes mistakes, even after their first time around”.