Kirsty the Scientist

Hi everyone!  Welcome to my blog - daily posts chatting about what it's like to work in a research lab during my 3 month undergraduate dissertation project! With the odd bonus blog thrown in too!  I hope you enjoy joining me on my little research journey and share your own lab and #scicomm experiences in the comments!  Kirsty 👩‍🔬

A friend from our research group told me that I looked really peaceful today! And it was true I had quite a relaxing day, whilst still doing a full day's worth of work! :) It's been a manic couple of days - with quite a lot of things on my plate all at once. But today has been the first day where I've been able to just focus on my lab work, all by myself, with no-one watching or shadowing me, and it was actually really lovely.  Reflecting on February:  I've also realised today is the last day of February, marking a full month of lab work for me and the start of the last month of my project.  via GIPHY via GIPHY via GIPHY This month has flown by, but equally it feels like I have been in the lab for so long (in a good way!) and I've learnt so much whilst I've been here! Now, I've really got to start getting my head down into writing now and think about the final experiments I've like to do to pull my project together and bring my project to a fi...

Today was all about taking a step back from all the slightly manic rush to generate data and take a look at everything I've gathered so far, analyse it properly and decide on the next step. So today, I tried to reflect on my results and start to form and build a story from my findings - and remembering to pop into tissue culture to split and feed my cells!  Here's a quick pic of my cells through the eyepiece of the microscope: (not the most graceful way to photograph cells!) 

As I'm starting to head towards the end of my project, I'm trying to work out how I'll string together the results I've gathered into a good story and make each part of my dissertation flow into the next. And plan the last few experiments of the project. Wish me luck - the whole task is starting to feel very daunting! 

Working in a research lab for my dissertation project has definitely changed my perceptions of what working in science and research is actually like. Maybe I've just been part of a good group, but this whole experience has been so much more sociable than I'd expected. Science is quite a collaborative subject so there is always open discussion on what people are working on, but everyone has been so welcoming and inclusive that I've felt like a member of the team from day 1.  But lab life can be really tiring - you need to be on the ball all the time, keeping tabs on everything that's going on and  thinking ahead to the next step. 

As I was talking about earlier this week, I've often been running more than one experiment at the same time during a week. But today, the differences between the two experiments seemed quite striking!  The two experiments are to look for two different indicators to suggest that my protein of interest is involved in making my cell type increase during cell stress/inflammation:  1. Look for the protein itself. This involves separating the proteins using electrophoresis (pulling the proteins through a polyacrylamide gel using an electric current to draw the proteins through the tiny pores of the bell - the smaller proteins get to the bottom of the gel quicker as they can wiggle through the holes faster. Then using a method called Wet Transfer, which pulls the protein out of the gel and onto a PVDF membrane - a technique that uses litres of buffer.  2. Looking for the genes that are expressed - suggesting that the cell is producing the proteins and using the part of the...

Today was slightly less manic than yesterday, but I still needed to be just as on top of everything! There can be lots of time gaps between parts of experiments, meaning it can be much more efficient to run two different experiments in parallel - fitting them together so that whilst you're waiting for one experiment, you can be working on another one. Today I needed to time some of these overlaps carefully, and had every ten minutes planned out to make sure not to miss any steps!