Colin King, Week #1

Having already familiarized myself with the procedure that I would be preforming for the beginning of my time at the Bissig Lab, I thought I would be quite prepared to start work and that everything would go smoothly. To say that this was true for my first week would undoubtedly be an overstatement, but in my opinion, it hasn't been to rough settling in.

The people at the Bissig Lab have made this transition much easier. My PI, Dr. Bissig, will unfortunately be leaving in a few days for a 2 month vacation, but he's certainly sacrificed a good amount of the remaining time he does have in order to show me around and bring me up to speed on the lab's progress. Dr. Legras and Dr. Pankowicz (who was only Mr. Pankowicz till about 4 days before I arrived) have also been extremely helpful. Apparently, Dr. Pankowicz will be acting as my primary "mentor" for the majority of the summer, and I'm pretty glad to have someone as laid back and easy to talk to as him. 

I've found out that in the Bissig lab, everyone is pretty lax with hours and what time they can leave/arrive/take breaks. On my first day, as per instruction, I arrived about 45 minutes earlier than the 10:00 am arrival Dr. Pankowicz had told me. I was the first one there, but luckily someone from the lab next door was able to let me in. At around 10, Dr. Bissig himself walked into the lab, and after we talked a little bit in his office and showing me to where my station would be in the lab, we had the following exchange:

Dr. Bissig: what time did you arrive today, Colin?

Me: around 9:15 

Dr. Bissig: oh jeez, yeah no one really is around till 10 or 11. Where's Frank (Dr. Pankowicz's first name)

Me: Oh, he actually texted me earlier saying he would arrive at 10:30. 

Dr. Bissig: *sigh* I told him to come early today!

Dr. Legras: *from the station behind us* Hah! 10:30 is early for him

Dr. Bissig: yeah, that's true. 

In addition to Dr. Bissig, Dr. Legras, and Dr. Pankowicz who I had already met in March, I was able to meet Dr. Celeste, another researcher in the lab, the two graduate students, Nika and Collin (Dr. Bissig calls me Colin Junior now to avoid confusion) and the one undergraduate student, Sebastian, who also work in the Bissig lab. Nika, Collin, and Sebastian have all been especially welcoming and helpful in showing me around and helping me out with my work whenever I need it (which is a lot). 

On the first day, Sebastian had be preform a very simple column purification of a digested plasmid for him. I was extremely nervous, but after he watched me pipette a few samples at a painstakingly slow pace, he seemed confident enough that I could finish the procedure on my own, which was printed out on a card very clearly. However, I managed to screw it up anyway. Instead of centrifuging for four minutes to dry off the sample, I only did it for one minute, and as a result, the product had a lot of excess liquid that made the DNA density far lower than it should've been. It was difficult admitting that within the first 10 minutes of working in the Lab, I had already messed up, but luckily Sebastian wasn't mad or anything, and the sample turned out to be usable anyway. He later bought me iced coffee at Starbucks (which is INSIDE the building, hell yeah) , so I figured out he wasn't mad about it or anything, phew. 

As for the actual research I'm helping with for the Bissig Lab, the two projects I've been assigned to focus on treating hypertension through altering the  angiotensin-renin pathway, and increasing dopamine uptake in the brain for Parkinson's patients. Basically, I will be attempting to knock out two genes in order to reduce high blood pressure, and increase the efficacy of dopamine treatments. The first step of this procedure entails synthesizing guide-RNA's for the CRISPR/cas9 system that will actually cut out the genes, done through cloning a short DNA insert into an empty vector. At the end of the first week, I have successfully synthesized three of the four gRNAs necessary. Unfortunately, the fourth has consistently been failing, as nothing shows up on my plates when I attempt to grow e-coli that have supposedly been transformed with my vector and the insert. However, I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to figure it out soon. After screwing up that first column purification, I think I can say everything has been running pretty smoothly. I've been able to help out since then with splitting some cell cultures, and already gotten to see a lot of things I had never seen before. Next week, I should be able to observe the harvesting of a mouse liver, and hopefully be able to aid in preforming one sometime later on.

While it has been a little overwhelming getting accustomed to the new surroundings of a professional lab, the most difficult part of the first week has been my new schedule. The one hour bus ride to Baylor in the morning has been tough. I've been waking up at 5:30 in order to workout and still catch the bus, which has been less than fun. Rushing back from the gym to take a shower, get changed, comb my hair (are you proud, Mr. Sham?), and grab a breakfast of a protein shake and an apple before while rushing to the bus station has been a little taxing. I usually get back home at 7:30, and pass out on the couch for an hour, cook something that resembles a meal for dinner., then lay down on the couch until the Stephen Colbert monologue is over, at which point I go to bed and do it all over again the next day. 

Week one overall has been fun, tiring, and definitely interesting. I'm currently thanking god though, for the Starbucks on the 3rd floor. 

Cool science stuff at my station
that Dr. Bissig has entrusted me with

My Station at the Bissig Lab