Week Two
Ok, so what haven’t I done in these last two weeks? I could start by talking about all the biking both to and from the San Diego State campus (4.2 miles each way), or the running I have been doing, the swimming I have taken up, or the canoeing– but none of that is as interesting as what I have been learning in the lab.
I began with Yan Wei outlining rough goals for my internship. She walked me through the steps for an experiment that would ultimately end with comparing the bacteria in my body to the bacteria of a cystic fibrosis patient. Among many things, we would look at species and antibiotic resistance. Since cystic fibrosis patients take antibiotics daily just to fight off infections and diseases, we would expect a high resistance in a CF patient. So I made a hypothesis and got to work taking a swab of my own bacteria from my mouth.
Yan Wei then showed me how to cultivate the bacteria on a petri dish. A media has to be created, meaning a certain environmental gel, so the bacteria can eat and grow. There are general medias and specific ones for specific bacteria. I made one for streptococcus and one that would grow pretty much anything (including things that aren’t bacteria), and was shown what to watch out for and how to be carfeul. I didn’t want other things like mold to get in to the dish and grow (ultimately mold did get in, but that was after I had my sample), and I really did not want to contaminate anything, like for instance the chemicals to grow more media or the bags with the sample tubes.
I went through various steps of isolating and purifying the bacteria, of taking single bacteria colonies and transferring them to separate plates. But the really cool stuff began this second week. Yan Wei taught me some molecular biology, used to extract and then test the bacteria DNA. There are a lot of steps to this, and recipes and formulas to follow that lyse the cell (break it apart), remove the cell membrane, destroy the proteins and organelles, and isolate the DNA. But I was surprised also of how simple and streamlined the whole process of extracting DNA is. In less than a day, a few thousand bacteria can become pure DNA in a vial. Twenty years ago the human Genome project took years and millions of dollars to extract and map out DNA. Just this week, I took almost forty samples, isolated the DNA, tested it for purity and made sure the process was not flawed using controls, so it is now ready to be sent off for DNA sequencing. I used two different methods, and had lots of time in between to watch world cup when the chemicals were setting up.
To top it off, on Friday I got to try out a quarter million dollar microscope while Yan Wei took a five day vacation because she just passed her PHD the Wednesday I got in. (Most people would celebrate longer, but she is so dedicated she’s back to work on Tuesday helping me.) I got to see some of my bacteria cells, and pictures of really cool cells from coral. I really could go on and on, but I’ll end it here while I can’t wait for next week.
There are no comments published yet.