Tuesday, November 15, 2016

'Failed' experiments...



The experimental process is quite a mess. I’ve been realizing more and more that science is imperfect and more often than not things go wrong. Unfortunately this was proven true for our Mod2 experiment. There was little to no statistical significance in the findings and this will make going home for Thanksgiving interesing since they’ll be asking what I’ve done and my response will be 'well I failed to upregulate Lactate production by using CRISPRi technology to plant a ‘roadblock’ to prevent transcription, and therefore function of the enzyme pflB to try and increase pyruvate to funnel more of that product into Lactate. And since none of the other words really make any sense they’ll just hear I failed.

                It sounds kinda sad but honestly I’m just excited to be doing real science and I wish we had time to go back and try another guide or run more trials and try and find out what went wrong since these implications are really powerful and I wish we had found something more substantial. I’m glad we got an introduction into CRISPR technology and having more of an idea of what it is amazing since it has so many possible applications. Writing the Mod2 report has been a great way to synthesize all that we learned and it opened my eyes to all the places the project could have gone wrong and so I think it was a great way to end the module! Thank you, instructors,  for all you do!


No comments:

Post a Comment