Kim Checking In!

Hello Everyone!

I have only been in the lab two days this week (because of UofA Orientation, a tedious and unfortunate process...) , but Aysen, the grad student I am shadowing, has already taught me so much. I've helped her run Western blots, DNA amplification and purification, and protein purifications so far. We are working on one of her projects with flagella, the part of E. coli which allows it to be motile. Presently, we are trying to isolate and amplify a specific protein in the flagella with our procedures. On Thursday, Aysen was busy collecting mucin, a protein found in the intestinal mucus lining in a variety of mammals (eg. cow), which we will test for its affinity to the flagella protein with the Western Blot. The first day I started Aysen was running three different procedures at the same time, one of which I had never heard of and the other two with which I was only vaguely familiar. It was intimidating at first, trying to jot down everything and make sense of it, but the thick stack of papers I was assigned to read is helping with that. I just read a research paper describing the traits and behavior of different pathogenic strains of E. coli and am on to another stack of papers of how pathogens in general invade hosts. I also gave my presentation on the research paper I was assigned and had some technical difficulties, but it worked out in the end. (Hint : Powerpoints should be saved on the desktop.)

When I first started annotating this paper, I was really just pushing myself through the sentences, word by word - looking each term up in the dictionary; it was tedious and frustrating. Finally, I mustered some courage and asked Aysen for some advice on how to get through my first big reference paper(although I was sure it was pretty basic material) and she really lessened my work load while helping me understand the content more. Referencing multiple sources (wikipedia!google!mentors!) and focusing on sections of the paper Aysen suggested helped so much!

This week was a huge stepping stone of learning for me. I'm still reading lots and expect to much more. Getting acquainted with the lab was challenging, but it is fun working with all these new machines and such. I am also so grateful for the background with the research papers because today at my Freshman Orientation I mentioned to my advisor, Dr. Slack, my interest in research and he actually showed me a paper one of his students had recently written and I felt far less intimidated by diving into college science. Next week, I hope to be able to run amplifications and purifications on my own and get a little more responsibility. I'm having a great time in the lab (INDEED, Daniel) and with the other interns and am really looking forward to our weeks together!

P.S. I need help attatching my powerpoint presentation to this and also Andrew how do you make certain words different colors? It adds so much to your words.