That guy isn't a HeLa cell...

I went to a joint lab meeting / seminar / science swap at the Salk Institute today. Liz, a postdoc in my lab, is presenting, so I went to cheer her on. It was my first time at Salk (oddly enough, our orientation involved commuting to places like the aquarium, and the Burnham, but not the Salk) and the bus driver helpfully told me when we got there so I didn't end up somewhere in, say, Del Mar, by accident.

Also lab-related is the end of the Olde Schoole prep that I spent almost all of Wednesday and part of yesterday on. And also an hours this morning. It involves me attempting to pierce a vial containing cryogens, carcinogens, and heavy metal with a surgical syringe in the dark. (Well, there was UV. Of strong enough wattage to warrant a very uncomfortable face shield but unfortunately it's a lab-grade UV which means there's a lot of UV and not a lot of light.) (Er. And it also requires two points of penetration -- one to release the pressure and the other to actually draw something out.) The yield is kind of abysmal, leading me to wonder why the PI prefers this method so much. Admittedly the poor yield might be entirely because of my lack of skill (first time around with the cesium chloride, after all), but personally, I think there's a reason why all the postdocs as well as the lab tech prefer to use the Qiagen kit. In fact the only person who prefers the other method is the PI so....

For those of you who are / will be doing lab work. Zap brand pippet tips suck. Or they don't, which is more of the problem. Specifically it's the 0.1 to 10 uL, filtered and aerosol proof type. It doesn't seem to seal to the micropippet correctly so the volume distributed is very inaccurate, not to mention sometimes you just cannot get the fluid out of the tip which is ultimately very frustrating. I got to use the nanodrop spectrophotometer though, which was cool. (Oh oh did I mention I got to run my own sequencing reactions the other day? Our lab has its own sequencing machine. Way cool.)

Eight papers and a presentation next week. I'm sleeping in tomorrow morning.

Cheers.