Jerry Wang, Week 5, Failure and Success at the same time

Week 5:
                My P.I. took me to a Japanese restaurant called “Pod” to have a lunch with one of our teachers from the alumni office! We had a great time talking about the progress my lab and I were able to make over summer. Apparently, we got a 3 million-dollar grants for one of our cross-nation clinical trial project. And this is the first time they had ever give so much money to a canine cancer research lab before! So, we are making histories right here. The food there was good too, I ordered something called “Teriyaki beef burger”, I know it sounds like some sort of weird Americanized Japanese food, but it is actually one of the best burger I had ever had. The meat was cooked just right and the sauce they put in the burger was not too salty but had just the right amount of sugar and salt. I had to admit, even though this is the first time I have been to that restaurant, it already became one of my favorite Japanese restaurant.

                On the other hand, I had encountered some difficulties in my project. First, there was nothing on the gel after the enzyme digestion. Then, the enzyme started to cut random places on my vector. After days of trouble shooting, it turned out that our newly ordered enzyme was actually broken. So, we have to order new enzyme from biotech company and that caused some delay. After many struggles, I finally performed ligation between my insert and vector and after that, eventually, I had a vector that contains antibody resistance trait and has my desired DNA sequence in it. Then, I performed a chemical transformation on the chemically competent bacteria. Nevertheless, on the next day, I was only able to find 2 colonies on the petri dish. If the ligation has worked and my bacteria was successfully transformed, there should be way more colonies on the petri dish. Therefore, sadly, these two colonies of bacteria were most likely to be contaminations and were not eligible for me to use them to extract CD3 epsilon DNA. Now with the end of my EXP program in sight, I really hope I will have better luck next week to at least have a working bacteria culture that the successor of my project will be able to work with and extract large quantity of DNA with. 

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