Monday, July 24, 2017
Once the weekend ended, Monday came crashing back, however the week had a great start. On Monday, the group and I took a field trip to Amyris. Not only did we find out what the goals of Amyris are, we were also able to see what goes on in regular day at a company like Amyris. The day got even better as it progressed; even lunch was better than usual. Although our groceries didn’t arrive in time for us to make our lunches, we were all bought burritos. After lunch, we were able to grow our skills in the lab by getting an intro to cloning. The procedure went smoothly, and it was an overall success. We finally ended the day by celebrating Jesus’ birthday with cheesecake and by peer reviewing each other’s resumes.
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
On Tuesday, we kicked off our day by creating the media we will need for our cloning experiments. The media didn’t take long to make, especially because it only took one step to make. Once we finished our morning lab work, we headed back to the room and had an hour long coding boot camp with Teacher Assistant Ron. This led up all the way into lunch, but due to the fact that James was absent today, I had to help Esa make the lunch for the rest of the students. After lunch, we went back into the lab to inoculate our samples in our media that we made earlier that day. Although I originally only had to inoculate 4 of samples, I ended doing James’ too. This ended up taking us about 20-30 minutes. We finished the rest of our day in the room working on stoichiometry, and flow charting the lab procedures for Wednesday.
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
To start our day, we were able to meet with the founder of iCLEM, Clem Fortman. Rather than just having a typical presentation, Clem decided to have a conversation with us where we ask him questions and he asks us questions. The presentation provided an overall eye-opening experience and showed us that you don’t have to have a stereotypical path to success. Later on in the day, we went into the lab and conducted a mini-prep to finally find the concentrations of our samples.
Thursday, July 27, 2017
On this day, we did not spend any time in the lab, but it was still just as interesting and engaging. Rather than going in and doing experiments, we spent the day in the classroom working on the computers. This includes a variety of activities such as coding and analyzing our DNA sequences from Wednesday. The coding part of the day was the most interesting because we were able to have a computer count base pairs and translate the sequence to RNA or amino acids. After lunch, Jesus showed us how to figure out what kind of bacteria we had and we began to conduct online research on it.
Friday, July 28, 2017
On the last day of the week, Jesus came in early to give us a presentation on proper presentation skills. The presentation itself was more thoroughly explained a few minutes later by Lauchlin, as we decided as a group what we were going to include and talk about in our presentation final presentation. Soon after, we had a photoshoot in the lab to present to others and remind ourselves of the memories we have created this summer. To finish off the week, we had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Jay Keasling and had a fun discussion that allowed us to learn and grow.