The Mo' You Know

2 modules down, 1 to go. I’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty odd feeling; it seems like just yesterday Prof. Engelward was teaching us about DNA damage and comet chips, and Dr. Lyell was explaining to us the difference between CRISPR and CRISPRi (*note* - I realized this had to be a pretty important distinction given that it showed up on a Mod 2 quiz and I had exactly 0 clue how to answer the question… but don’t worry, now I know the difference). Now, here we are weeks later, having taken the first step in making phage batteries.

I think that things definitely began to pick up in this module. I don’t think it was particularly helpful that content in 20.320 simultaneously became more abstract and challenging. Definitely much more of a balancing act this time around. Apparently the 20.109 teaching staff are not crazy for constantly repeating to “start. early. on. assignments.” As they say…

In terms of Mod 2 content, I’d definitely say that my chief complaint was the abundant use of Benchling. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s infinitely better than trying to design primers manually (spent the whole summer doing this. 0/10 would not recommend) or hand-drawing plasmids. And I certainly enjoyed getting to name the plasmids (shout out to the aristocratic Sir Victor de Cas9 Vector). But man, there’s only so long I can stare at nucleotides before my brain goes on autopilot. I swear, after a few weeks of that, I was counting plasmids instead of sheep to go to sleep.

All in all, however, I think that this module was a much better representation of what “real-world” research is like. In other words, you pour your heart and soul and time into an experiment, confident things will work correctly, and then when you finally collect your results, you realize that – well – things didn’t go quite as expected. Take our team’s data, for example (TR Green – I ain’t lying). Now, we expected D-Lactate production to be maximal under anaerobic conditions in the presence of CRISPRi and aTc. But you know what didn’t go as expected? Which condition in fact had 0 (read: negative) D-Lactate production? You guessed it. So you could say that there were some undertones of frustration and resentment in my research summary. But c’est la vie. That’s the nature of the beast. You can’t be intimidated by every setback in research. Otherwise, how would we get progress?

Philosophizing aside, I still thought this module was – in theory – pretty near. It was amazing to see how a brainstorming session could go from paper to reality. One day we were contemplating which portion of the fermentation pathway to target, and the next we were implementing our design in the lab.

Of course, none of this could have been done without our always enthusiastic and patient teaching staff! A huge thank you to Dr. Lyell and Leslie and Emily and Maxine for all of your help!