Basket Case and more Science Mumbo Jumbo

Do you know that Greenday song- Basket Case?

The first verse goes:

"Do you have the time
to listen to me whine?
About nothing and
everything all at once.
I am one of those
melodramatic fools.
neurotic to the bone
no doubt about it."

I swear this verse describes my life this week; sometimes it's hard to be female. At least I'm going to see Green Day next month!

Did I mention that I am working for Nobel Laureate Mario Capecchi this summer?

Just kidding, I know it's all I can talk about and you are probably sick of hearing about it.

Anyway, Dr. Capecchi (because I'm too chicken to go up to him and say "Hey Mario, what's up?") had his Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) review last week. What happens is the PI (Principal Investigator) has 30 minutes to give a presentation/review of how their lab's work is going- they get a 10 second warning before the microphone shuts off. The PI presents in front of a review board of 25 other scientists who ultimately decide whether or not to continue funding the PI's lab.

I love listening in to people's conversations while I'm doing my thing in the lab... you hear so many interesting things. Kay (the lab manager) was talking to Matt (post-doc) about how Mario came to her at 5:00 the night before his review to ask her to change a PowerPoint slide for him if it wasn't too much trouble. He told her that he was planning on about a minute a slide (*at this time he had over 70 slides). Last thing Kay heard was that Mario had narrowed down the slides to about 35 or 40. Mario spent A LOT of time preparing- he even read the latest papers/publications of everyone on the review board (let me just tell you, scientific papers are NO easy reading- at least for me).

It was Kay (and pretty much everyone else's) opinion that after you get the Nobel Prize you can kind of "relax" when it comes to the HHMI review because they aren't going to cut funding (apparently HHMI gets certain bragging rights when one of their PI's gets the Nobel Prize). Mario didn't "relax" in his preparation- he went in knowing his stuff... I guess that's how you get to be a Nobel Laureate.

We found out later that day that his presentation went good and that the panel of 25 scientists questioned him for two and a half hours. Mario came back to Utah and we had lab meeting the next day- HHMI doesn't tell you right away if your funding is continued.

Friday afternoon we hear the news.... funding is continued for the next five years! (I really don't think anyone was shocked). Lesson to be learned: even Nobel Prize winners get nervous.

I come to find out that the "funding" is over 1,000,000 dollars a year! (imagine Dr. Evil saying one million dollars!).

We had happy hour yesterday in the lab to celebrate... I was sitting at my bench and I look over to see Dr. Capecchi wheeling a cart of beer into the cold room (there's a walk in fridge that is like 20 below). I had my BYU-student-Diet Coke.

Today I learned the hard way how lab work differs from any other job I can think of. In the blink of an eye, two days worth of work can go down the drain!

This is a gel electrophoresis chamber/power supply. For those of you not fluent in dork, allow me to explain:

You boil a powder with some buffer in a microwave and when it cools, it forms a gel- imagine you are making Jello- except the gel is a lot stiffer than Jello.

You put your DNA in the gel and then run an electrical current through the gel... it separates the DNA by size so you get this:

Can you see the different bands (is anyone still reading this? I'm rambling.)? By looking at the different bands and measuring their size you can figure a bunch of stuff out about your DNA.

I spent two days growing a bunch of yeast samples, extracting the DNA (which took forever), quantifying the DNA, calculating restriction digests, setting up the restriction digests (cutting the DNA with enzymes), and then running the gel. When I went to look at the gel, it slipped out of the damn tray and splattered all over the floor!!! We were going to do a Southern Blot (transfer the DNA from the gel onto a piece of paper to radio-label it to see how many copies of our gene were put in the yeast clones). A Southern Blot is like a two or three day process by itself! I felt like a big idiot but Matt was cool about it- he said it's happened to him and to everyone else. At least no one saw me drop the gel on the floor.

I'm going in early tomorrow to extract some more DNA and start the process all over again.