LAB!

I don't really think Eric can claim my posts to be boring after describing how "cool" our steam plant is. Million-year-old dead body parts go in, hot water vapor + other stuff comes out. Whoop-dee-flippin'-doo.

But I can't turn down an opportunity to give an equally field-specific recollection of my day...

This morning, I woke up around 7:30, which isn't typical. I had to pee. After takin' care of business, I went back to bed. Then I woke up around 9:00, like I do sometimes. I took a shower, ate a breakfast of grainy flakes and dehydrated strawberries rehydrated in milk. It was pretty good, made me feel like an astronaut. I piddled around a little, then headed off to the lab like I usually do.

But today was different...we had new results! Protein A from G. metallireducens exists in two forms, but we only want to study one of the forms. To do this, we tried using a modifying protein which looks alot like the Tri-Force from Zelda (I had to look it up, don't judge, at least on that particular point). So a few days ago I set up a reaction to convert Protein A to the form we want. We seriously keep tubes that have more than .5 mg/ml. That's a lot. During peak hours...we don't run out. But that's not even the cool part. In another room in the building, we have an instrument that blows the protein to tiny bits and bends the fragments around a big loop using a magnet. It's pretty much silent. We got the results back from that analysis today...and our reaction worked!

One of my classes is canceled tomorrow, should be great.