Week 4

The 4th week was a short one, only 3 days in-lab due to the 4th of July. Though I enjoyed the day off, this did leave me with 4 days of work to do in an actual timespan of 3 days.

Tuesday was incredibly busy. I did three Protein Assays, loaded and ran two gels, performed two western blots and collected a set of Lysates. That means I was running two experiments simultaneously. This was the only day I had to do this, because the results of my third Protein Assay showed that there were problems somewhere in the experiment (possibly in the preliminary stuff that I had no part in) that spoiled both our controls, and rendered the experiment unusable.

Wednesday and Thursday were uneventful. I treated the membranes from Tuesday once each day (peIF2-alpha on wednesday, and total eIF2-alpha on thursday), but this left me about two hours of work to do, and the workday is much longer. So during the down-time I helped our grad-student, Joy, with several of her projects. This involved collecting Lysates (a set of 8 and a set of 12) and doing some tissue-culture. This also got me a crash course in ER (Endoplasmic Reticulum) Stress and how it applies to cancer.

So the fourth week was short and uneventful, but well spent.