From academic to clinical mindset (Week 4)

I am Adarsh Singh and I am working under Dr. Kyu Rhee lab. This week has been full of joys as I finally got to start working independently on bench. This week I ran a SDS GEL with silver staining in order to visualise my samples with very low concentrations of membrane vesicles. Normally, coomasie blue staining is done but since the detection limit of coomasie blue is around 5ug of total protein, I chose silver staining instead as in some samples protein concentration was less than 4 ug. This week I just ran one test gel as I am quite new to this and in order to get best gel image, one need to understand the nuisances especially the developing and stopping time during the staining procedure. 

On Friday, I also went for clinic, shadowing under Dr. Christopher Brown. It was a really great experience as I got to understand how difficult it is it treat a TB infection and I also got to know TB infection is not limited to respiratory system, it can go in our brain as well. 

Next week I am planning to purify previously isolated vesicles from four Bacteroides spp culture. The challenge in this case would be to get good concentration after the purification step as we tend to loose a lot of it during density gradient. I also plan to focus some of my time for the Lipidomics experiment as getting that done would be the greatest achievement of this whole summer immersion.

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