Lab meeting today. Jon presented and his research deals a lot with imaging of cells. This is one form of data I have a hard time understanding. The fluorescence of different colors and different proteins and the merged images and interpreting them has always confused me. It was no different, but after getting through a thorough read of Danielle's most recent paper (which provides me with so much information for my poster) (which took 6 hours in total to go through all the supplementary figures and understand every piece of data), I feel a little better about looking at fluorescent cell images now.
At the lab meeting, we also discussed the issue of finding desk space for all the incoming people. The verdict, at least the one that impacts me, is that I'll be moving from my own desk to sharing a desk space with my mentor (since I'll only be here for one more week), and then a grad student (Nick) will come and take 1/3 of my space while Jobart (another grad student) will take up 2/3 of my space. I guess I didn't appreciate how nice it was to have my own desk (and/or not end up in the storage/fly room like Hetal) until I'm finally being evicted. Also, they installed a huge Mac desktop at my desk in preparation for Jobart's moving in, and it looks pretty sleek. Too bad it's not for me because that would be pretty awesome.
While checking my cell lines today, I found some odd crystalline formations and I was so worried it was contamination. After my mentor looked at it under the microscope, he just told me to wipe down the cell line flask with alcohol because it could just be something on the outside of the container. I cleaned it and looked at it again, and the weird crystals were gone, but now I'm a little weirded out, but also intrigued by what those formations actually were, because in a weird, other-worldly way, they looked cool, with their crystal-sharp triangular shapes, clumped in a disturbing oval-shaped cluster.
A funny (but almost tragic) incident that happened today was when Sue noticed that the pipet from the cell culture hood was missing. Things that are in the hood must stay in the hood (for fear of contamination) and this was a big deal firstly because it wasn't supposed to leave the hood in the first place, but also, equipment of any sort is expensive. Emails were sent out to the whole lab and every person's lab bench was searched, but the pipet never showed up. Finally, Black and Lesley decided to search the trash bins in the cell culture room, and they found the pipet, with a pipet tip still attached, in the garbage! They were so lucky that the garbage people didn't make their rounds at their normal time today (they were a little later than usual), otherwise the pipet would have been gone. But I guess someone must have wanted to discard their tip but ended up throwing the whole pipetter away! It's a little silly that this happened, but I'm off the hook since it was missing yesterday, was present on Wednesday, and Thursday morning and I didn't use the hood within that timeframe that it disappeared.
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