Student Research at Duke

This week we have been busy presenting our chalk talks to our fellow students and this afternoon Dr. Willard will be lecturing about genomics. I enjoyed listening to everyone’s talks and found it particularly interesting when a familiar technique, cell line, etc. was mentioned, reminding me just how much I have learned these past four weeks. On Monday I followed Tam and did my first maxiprep, a technique to grow large quantities of bacteria with your cloned vectors and later transfected those in Cos-7 cells. Tuesday I ran a gel to check our miniprep products from the previous week so that Wednesday we were able to send the DNA (”protein X” fragments 1-139 and 140-215) for sequencing. We also started our mutagenesis experiments and are busy PCRing, digesting and transforming these past two days. Unfortunately one of our gels had holes in it so I realized too late that our samples were leaking out so we have to redo those digestions. Also we’re doing a Western blot for the nonmutated “protein X” fragments (that we sent for sequencing). Anywho after locopops at the seminar today, Julie Stevenson and I are off to her house for the weekend. Look out for an update next week then!