Orientation and Extraction

On Monday I participated in the orientation for CMOP interns. This was a familiar process, as this is my second summer in the CMOP program. Once again, Dr. Baptista gave a wonderful introductory speech followed by Vanessa providing us with plenty of interesting and useful information.

Tuesday was spent becoming familiar with papers related to the subjects and techniques I will be utilizing during my time here this summer. I read 5 papers total. After this I attended my Mentor, Wendy Smythe's, presentation regarding her research while here at CMOP. 

Wednesday was spent becoming familiar with the general outline and details of the project I will be working on throughout the summer, as well as becoming trained on the microscope. Afterward I was introduced to my samples and reviewed the extraction procedure I performed on Thursday. 

Thursday the extraction was performed on all 9 samples. The extraction protocol used was the Qiagen blood and tissue sample protocol provided. Afterward, nanodrop was used to confirm that each sample contained enough DNA. Nano drop confirmed that each extraction was successful. This was followed up by a gel electrophoresis analysis, which showed that each sample does in fact contain only one type of DNA.

On Friday I attended lab meeting where we discussed improvements to the poster Brad is taking to his Gordon conference. After this I attended an interesting thesis defense on a version of herpes and one mechanism it uses to evade tetherin. After that I attended a brown bag seminar on ethics and academic integrity. My extraction was then performed, however after the lysis step but before any of the other steps we additionally performed a glass bead step provided by Rick which involved shearing the cells open. The rest of the procedure was the same with the exception that the lysis step was incubated for ~3hrs and 20 minutes instead of the ~80mins. This was due both to constrains because of the various meetings as well as the failure of the previous procedure, which we speculate was due to an incomplete lysis. This is also the reason the glass bead technique was added.