Cell bio is driving me insane. We're covering stuff on protein transport and we're supposed to read these three papers for discussion, along with answering questions. The problem I'm having is that I understand the gist of the papers, but the questions that we're supposed to answer ask for basically "what were the authors thinking when they did this?" And being papers from Nature, data was usually "not shown," or "in the supplementary material"
I guess another problem is that I write down what I think is the right answer to the question, that nagging "what if this happened" scenario pops up, and then I have to change it.
Or maybe I'm just having an "off" day.
...and I'm gonna go study genetics now.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
Week 1
New project: get to be working with embryonic stem cells isolated from mice. There's a paper out there that plated ESCs in media and pretty much "forced" the cells to differentiate into hormone producing cells of the pituitary. So I'll be repeating their experiment; growing cells in a dish, extracting RNA, and doing RT-PCR to find out what kind of markers are expressed in the different stages of development.
Classes just started last week, so the workload hasn't gotten into full swing yet; on the flip side, there's a lot more papers to read. First years take two classes, an ethics seminar, and do lab rotations. Which translates to four papers to read a week, at least.
We'll see how things go once the ethics seminars begin.
Another note.. the new rotation student in my previous lab (zebrafish one) tracked me down in class earlier this week to ask me a question about my lab notebook. He's working on the extension of my rotation project this summer: still trying to map the mi40 gene. But he gets to jump right into the mapping part; I spent my entire summer looking for mi40 hets. Anyways, there's another gene in that lab, mi215, which, when mutated, gives the same phenotype as mi40. The fish don't complement, which means two things are possible:
a. mi40 and mi215 are the same gene
b. they are different genes, but in the same pathway to get a functional eye. So if one of them is faulty, the entire pathway collapses
The new rotation student told me that mapping mi40 was essentially a "waste of time" because he's done linkage mapping before, and when two genes don't complement, they are always the same gene. He wasn't even willing to consider the other option, even though the professor was unsure of the first possibility.
So seriously.. how does he know already? He hasn't even tried.
--------------------------------------------------------
Finally, I've noticed since grad school started I've became much more impatient about a lot of things outside of school. The program here (along with every other program I've interviewed at) expects grad school to be everyone's #1 priority. I think I'm a little scared of losing interest in what I'm doing if I lost focus, so I've channeled a lot of energy into learning what has been done in the past, what's going on now, and what new things might pop up in the future. Unfortunately that doesn't leave much room in my attention span, so everything else gets treated as a black and white issue.
I should probably take up yoga as a new pastime...
Classes just started last week, so the workload hasn't gotten into full swing yet; on the flip side, there's a lot more papers to read. First years take two classes, an ethics seminar, and do lab rotations. Which translates to four papers to read a week, at least.
We'll see how things go once the ethics seminars begin.
Another note.. the new rotation student in my previous lab (zebrafish one) tracked me down in class earlier this week to ask me a question about my lab notebook. He's working on the extension of my rotation project this summer: still trying to map the mi40 gene. But he gets to jump right into the mapping part; I spent my entire summer looking for mi40 hets. Anyways, there's another gene in that lab, mi215, which, when mutated, gives the same phenotype as mi40. The fish don't complement, which means two things are possible:
a. mi40 and mi215 are the same gene
b. they are different genes, but in the same pathway to get a functional eye. So if one of them is faulty, the entire pathway collapses
The new rotation student told me that mapping mi40 was essentially a "waste of time" because he's done linkage mapping before, and when two genes don't complement, they are always the same gene. He wasn't even willing to consider the other option, even though the professor was unsure of the first possibility.
So seriously.. how does he know already? He hasn't even tried.
--------------------------------------------------------
Finally, I've noticed since grad school started I've became much more impatient about a lot of things outside of school. The program here (along with every other program I've interviewed at) expects grad school to be everyone's #1 priority. I think I'm a little scared of losing interest in what I'm doing if I lost focus, so I've channeled a lot of energy into learning what has been done in the past, what's going on now, and what new things might pop up in the future. Unfortunately that doesn't leave much room in my attention span, so everything else gets treated as a black and white issue.
I should probably take up yoga as a new pastime...
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