Mod 2 was an interesting time. I am glad that we got to use CRISPR, *the* hot topic of biological engineering. I remember, last year, when Jennifer Doudna came to give a talk at MIT and I thought the people of the Koch were preparing to go to battle. My grad student described it as a talk "too close to enemy territory." But yes, I'm happy to have finally gotten the chance to actually understand what all the excitement was about, and to use it with my own, bare [gloved] hands.
Not going to lie, but the first few days using Benchling to design our plasmids and oligos and sequencing primers gave me a literal headache. It didn't help that Michelle's laptop battery kept dying so we were down to my sad, 12.5in screen. I remember doing DNA engineering in high school, laying out the 120375 sheets of paper on a desk in front of me, and using a highlighter (with the help of ctrl+f on a computer) to design my primers. I almost prefer that to Benchling. But we made it through and we made...a thing!
Unfortunately, our system didn't work very well. In fact, it may have decreased lactate production, which is the opposite of what we wanted. But, at least someone's construct worked in our lab section, which made writing the report 100000x easier. Thank you Blue Team! I probably should have looked more into the gene and "putative" promoter region more, but time constraints existed. Writing the Mod2 report wasn't terrible in comparison to the 4 similarly-sized reports we had to do for 5.310 (that's a whole different rant for a different time).
I really enjoyed doing the Journal Club! I spoke much slower than I thought. I also put way more time into it than I thought I'd need to. But I guess that's how learning works.
Okay, that is the end of my scattered thoughts. Thanks teaching staff! You guys are the bomb! No memes from me because I'm lazy AF.
<3 Aria
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