Peddie EXP 2017

Hey everyone! The next three weeks in my EXP experience take a really interesting turn. I had initially planned to be done with my EXP on July 29th, but in case you haven’t read my last blog post, I decided to extend it to further my understanding and get my hands on some more projects. I chatted with my post-doc Kayla on the 29th and she advised me to operate remotely and do things from home for two weeks, work on the coding course and the proposals, while her and the PI, Nick, craft a project for me to do with some of the knowledge I’ve picked up on coding. The lab uses this great interface called Slack to communicate with each other, there are group chats, individual direct messages, and you are also able to send snippets of code! So that’s what I did for that 7th week, continued editing and revising the medical documents and made sure that they were all ready to be sent off the IRB. I worked on my online coding course, which was really interesting, but a learning curve is definitel...

My final days at the Bissig lab have turned out to be the most eventful yet. In the past days, I've harvested the livers from the mice injected with my gRNA constructs, harvested the DNA from those livers, and analyzed that DNA. In addition, I learned to split live cell cultures and infect human cells with viruses, and continued cloning gRNA constructs for other lab members.  Of the above, the dissection and harvesting of the livers was by far the most interesting experience. My constructs targeting the Agt and Ddc genes were injected into several mice each, and since it had only been a little less than two weeks since the injection, we couldn't preform many of the assays to determine what the effects of cutting into the genome had been. However, what we could do was harvest the livers of just one of the mice, and determine if my gRNA had been successful in leading the cas9 to cut in the right place. Essentially, whether or not what I had spent about 8 of the last nine wee...