Kill time!

It's...... Blarney close to 12pm on a Chinese New Year and I'm holing myself up in this lab.
(oh well, I'm alone might as well bring my baby for company eyh :D)

I'm suppose to be presenting my results on 10am Tuesday but after 6 slab of gels and going through the whole bottle of 2% agarose finely made by Steve, I've no results to show. Between the extraction, the PCR and the electrophoresis, something went way wrong somewhere and now, I'm stuck here with less than 48 hours to figure out what I've done wrong.

So far I figure extraction was OK since spectrophotometry indicates I did have some DNA from my extraction. I'm not gonna be that bothered with the ratio because it seemed decent enough and if contamination is an issue some weird bands should pop up in my gel. Of course the gel was OK because Steve made it and the DNA ladder popped. Which means the PCR is the culprit.

I got myself a kit for that so I can avoid this whole fiasco but true to enigma that is life, that's where it goes wrong. When you want to test a thing, other thing has to be fixed and since I'm testing extraction method I'd figure using a PCR kit would make the PCR step "fixed" but trust me to botch stuff up.

First thought it was the sample, over diluted (which is was) so increase concentration, not helping. Then again, the extraction method used Chelex which is a PCR inhibitor so used samples extracted using random kit I found in the lab, nada. Figured it's the PCR mix, made another batch with colour but the colour didn't pop, I guess I didn't get the concentration of the coloured buffer right. Another batch and still nil.

Thankfully I'm living with a Molecular Biology lecturer finishing her PhD so she adviced me to try 3 things. Seriously, if I am to screw up stuff, I might as well do it now while she's still around. You gotta love the presence of people like that.



Funny thing is I am effing stressed that I haven't got any results and I have to present it soon. But with every defeat that I faced, I didn't feel like throwing down the towel but instead, I kept asking, what went wrong. It became an itch that I'm unable to figure out how to scratch just yet. I really really want to know what I did wrong. It's frustrating but there's a sort of elation, and excitement in me when thought I've figured it out. Yes, they were never the correct answer or there are more to it that're missing.This is the thing I love about learning, there's always that curiosity that needs to be entertained.

But it's kinda annoying when you read it first it's like A, B, C and D but when you try to start, you realise that before you do A, you'd need to do some other stuff then more stuff in between A and B and some more stuff. But yeah, sorta fun, I finally get to fiddle with stuff in stead of guzzling on facts after facts after facts and wonder how is it really like. HAHAHA!


OK, to work I'll be!