On the 3rd day of Christmas my dear Mod gave to me… M13 phage!

(Confusing attempt at holiday title? Check)

The holidays are fast approaching. Sometimes that feels like it means a tired slog through three feet of final projects while struggling to pick out Christmas presents and dreaming of someday making gingerbread cookies.  

But I can make it through! Because cookies! And wrapping paper! And lights! – All the lights! Twinkle lights and non-denominational holiday tree lights and virus-battery powered LEDs.

Even without the lights, Mod3 is really interesting. I don’t have much experience with batteries so I was a bit nervous when the words cathode and capacity started swirling around. But the 20.109 teachers explained everything well and I had my summer friends the M13 phage there to keep me company :) I used a M13 library expressing antibodies on the pIII proteins this summer. It was neat to see them pop back up and realize what a useful little organism they are. I also learned a considerable amount more detail about their properties and morphology – a common theme of 20.109 has been taking something I thought I knew and figuring out how much I still have left to learn.

Also we basically got to make Christmas cookies. Tiny iron phosphate, gold, phage, Super P, and PTFE cookies. Very cool. Also a good excuse to blame my current inability to focus on anything that doesn’t involve peppermint or ginger on that particular lab day.

Perhaps because it wasn’t going to involve candy canes, I wasn’t that excited about TEM day. Professor Belcher kept saying how cool it would be and showing pretty pictures, but I guess I felt the pictures we looked at in class were spoilers.

Looking at the iron phosphate and gold biotemplated on the phage in Professor Belcher’s slides was fascinating, but I didn’t see how looking at images on a computer screen was going to be all that different from looking at images on a different computer screen.

I forgot they were going to be MY images.

Watching Jifa zoom in our samples was a bit like unwrapping presents. As if I’d asked my mom for something specific and the box looked to be the right shape but when it came down to it I didn’t actually know. And as it turned out, I was wrong. While I think I would have still been excited about the expected TEM results (see image “Mine”), the fact that our data differed significantly from what was expected didn’t hurt as far as making it interesting to look at.

Now I have to figure out some plausible hypotheses for why the iron phosphate content is so low –

-but I think that feels like science.