Out of the frying-pan into the fire

So, last day of co-op today! =P........it was rather uneventful and not very dramatic........the lab was oddly empty today, with only 5 other people in the two rooms that we occupy, which normally houses around 12.......

but yes, these past four months have definitely been interesting.......not quite sure how to describe what has happened (both in and out of the lab)........i guess really the only adequate description of such an experience is that I found myself sailing across the ocean and all of a sudden I realized I no longer knew where I was going........the sky started to cloud over and waves started to thrash....rain started pouring and lightning filled the sky.......and so I found myself thinking that if i sailed just a little further I'll see land..........

So after roughing it past four month's of co-op, and realizing I'm more lost than ever, new concerns have made figuring out where I'm headed a trivial matter......I have been blind-sided by tropical storm BCIT. With its seven courses and five labs and 32 hours of classes a week, it's bound to wreck havoc and cause major system failures.....yet, even as we speak and the gale force winds start to pick up, storm-proofing will have to wait.........the co-op paper needs to be written and the questionnaire requires completion.........

hai.........shoot me.........

Drunk at the Lab

The story goes that someone at the lab got their paper accepted, and so we had a little celebration before lunch with some bee-shaped cookies and some honey whiskey (or more appropriately, honey diluted with whiskey)


Now I've never had anything this strong ever before.....so i was rather startled by how repugnant it smelled (yes, I'm definitely no fan of alcohol).....but of course, out of politeness I had to finish the cup I was given......by the time I was finished everything kinda tilted to the right and walking in a straight line presented a bit of a challenge XD.......and i also developed a headache for the rest of the afternoon.........good thing i didnt have anything intensive to do, just more bacterial plating

Mid-term Progress Report

So, July has finally decided to round the corner, and in the midst of constant barbecues (5 in a week) and slightly unbearable heat, my co-op term has past its midway point. What would I have to say about it at this point?

Well, the first thing is that things have definitely gotten a little ridiculously busy. With renewed fervour in collecting eggs and starting fresh cultures, my incubator has now accumulated close to 40 plates of cultures, all of them screaming and demanding some fresh media either every Monday and Thursday or every Tuesday and Friday. To make things all the more complicated, they are suspension cells and are thus not attached to the wells, preventing me from simply sucking out all the media with a vacuum and an evil laugh.

And of course, I am now one co-op student working on two separate and completely different projects. Not only am I now responsible for growing some honeybee cells, I will also be responsible for some bacterial assays. So yes, I do both cell cultures AND bacterial cultures.

However, on a brighter note my bee cultures have turned the corner and are now doing fairly well. After numerous tries and countless failed attempts, we were blessed with cultures that appeared like the following (I really hope I don't get sued for releasing these photos.......I don't recall signing anything that tells me I can't.....there were more photos, but they were all blurry and out of focus):

Culture 6 No Antibiotics, 200x Phase Contrast Microscope, with suspension embryonic cells and adherent fibroblasts

We have finally realized what has been screwing us over, and that is the antibiotics we have been using. We had it at such a ridiculously high concentration that none of our cells grew properly. But now that we've reduced the antibiotic concentration by almost 1000 fold, things are starting to look pretty. There was even this one clump of cell that was contracting periodically as if it was a heart. It was totally wicked XD definitely not something we were shown at school =P

So, looking at my lab related schedule for the next little while...
July 11 - Flying to Grande Prairie
July 15 - Expected Return Date
July 27 - Project Presentation
Once School Starts - Co-op Paper Due

The Scarcest Commodity

I was wrong.

I thought co-op would have been a nice break from school. I thought it would give me a chance to see what I've learnt put into practice developing something completely brilliant and totally wicked. But the wrongest thing of all, was that I thought I would get more time.

There were great plans for this summer. To read. To play during the weekends. To swim. To bike. To polish my piano skills once again. But as the days turn into weeks and the weeks stretch into months, I've come to realize that most of these would not come to past.

I'd be lucky to get home by 6 in the evening, and with Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Friday nights occupied, along with the many meetings and engagements scattered over the weekends, I feel like I'm being more starved of time than I had been when school was still in session. There is Up to watch, along with various Bards.......and I really really REALLY want to swim. Maybe I should just randomly go one evening rather than waiting for the weekend. I miss doing laps and I hate how my shoulders have gotten so tight and hunched from bending over some computer or some honeybee frame all day....

Though I suppose this summer has had its purpose. It's making me rethink a lot of things.....that of course, is another post altogether (maybe even a couple of posts).......maybe I'll describe a couple of those things the next time I have the luxury of indulging in a little spare time

The Road to Immortality

Mankind has always been in search of immortality. Whether looking to some scarcely known cult, or to some mystical Chinese herbs, or more recently, to cryopreservation and the secret workings of the telomere, we have been relentlessly trying to uncover the means to beat even Death himself.

Honeybee cells, however, have chosen a different path.

After being painstakingly picked out of a frame of honeycomb, surviving the rigour of sterilization with bleach and ethanol, and enduring the seemingly endless hammering of a pipette tip, the honeybee eggs (or rather, the cells within those eggs) have earned a well-deserved two-day break from the pressures of a laboratory experiment. Yet little do they know, their eternal fate is in the hands of a largely ill-equipped co-op student --- me.

The task at hand appears deceivingly simple. To find an oncogene and introduce it to the cells. Yet one key factor has been overlooked. The person entrusted with this critical issue has absolutely no experience with genetic manipulation. True I have introduced foreign DNA into cells before, but the extent of that endeavour amounted to mixing two solutions together, drip them over the cells, and presto! the cells glow green the next morning! The task at hand, however, is a completely different story......

Not only are there many possible methods to introduce foreign DNA, there are a plethora more oncogenes identified. As if to multiply the difficulty of this problem, I am responsible for actually finding the plasmids required, and if a commercial copy is unavailable, I will have to somehow, someway figure out the exact sequence and all the leader the trailer sequences and all the primers needed......and to deal the final blow to the hope of these unfortunate cells, there is absolutely no previous literature on anyone attempting this feat with honeybee cells. Our best bet rests with the common fruitfly.......

I guess the quest for immortality is no easy task, even for honeybee cells. Thank God for Jesus, eh? XD

Following Other Blogs

There is one thing i really like about Bloggers, and it's the ability for me to follow on the Dashboard other blogs that are not explicitly from Bloggers. All I need to do is just to type in the blog URL and the posts just show up.....I think it's very magical =P......I can now keep an eye on the blogs that I would like to follow without having to actually go to the sites to check all of them on a regular basis (i suppose you can argue that the RSS function was there since ages ago, but i never bothered to put it into use XD......but this blogger thing is just conveniently there =P)

In other news, UBC has paid me, thos i must say i was disappointed.......I wouldnt mind having the two days at the conference not paid for, and I kinda expected them to deduct taxes from my pay (tho I explicitly put a tick in the box saying i was making less than my tax allowance, so they really shouldnt be deducting them).....but then thing that I was the most surprised about was that they are not paying me the full 8 hours a day.....DESPITE the fact that I'm there from 8:30 to 5 every day......feel kinda ripped off now, coz i thought i was going to be paid the full 8 hours so i figured i better be working for 8 hours.......I guess i should find out how many hours per day they are actually paying me for.....it better be 7.5, because if it is 7 then there's no way i'm showing up that early anymore!! >__<"

But there is one thing that is getting me very excited =P.....we are finally starting the Truth Project this Thursday night =P......there really isn't another less generic word.....I am genuinely excited =P

The 4th International Symposium on Enabling Technologies for Proteomics (ETP)

Now, this definitely isn't the first conference I've been to, but it's definitely the first one in the field of science =P So i was naturally a little uncertain of what to make of it all and had no clue what to expect of all the presenters =P.....I was hoping they'd have a prettier logo for me to put on here, but guess in the realm of science prettiness really isn't much of a virtue XD


The conference was held at the Four Seasons Hotel downtown, and basically the program was just speakers after speakers doing presentations and more presentations (with little coffee breaks and lunch breaks sprinkled here and there (although lunch was filled with more talks, this time from companies would produces the instruments and machinery for proteomics talking about their latest product)

I've definitely attended better and more worthwhile conferences XD, but for a fresh undergrad student testing the waters with my toe it wasn't too bad an experience =P.....true there was a ridiculous amount of jargons and abbreviations (things like GC-MS and SDS-PAGE i know about, but stuff like MALDI? QToF? triple Quad?MRM? Orbitrap? CAD? ETD?) I have no idea what they all mean other than they either stand for some fancy equipment or some fancy protein analysis procedures........but asides from the handicap in general proteomics knowledge and a very rudimentary knowledge of molecular biology (of which the specifics I could once recall for the animal cell final has diffused out of my mind) the whole conference wasnt too too bad =P The food and drinks were good, AND we all get a complementary cocktail drink at the end of the day (tho I chose not to take advantage of that =P)

The only complaint that I have to make is how insanely overtime we went.....we had to cut our break short by 20 minutes as well as truncate some of the presentations in order to end 40 minutes AFTER the scheduled time!.......and although there were quite a number of really good presenters (especially the first two, the last two, and the one right before lunch =P), there was this one lady that was absolutely, DISGUSTINGLY horrible........

You might have thought a presentation on protein-based diseases would have been rather interesting, but all she did, especially towards the end of that dreaded ordeal......she shoved mass spectrum after mass spectrum after graph after graph after more mass spectrum after more mass spectrum after more graphs after even more mass spectrum.......and all she did with them was talk on and on about who knows what.......she mentioned something about different residues and the random subtle difference between the stupid mass spectra.........everyone at the table just looked at each otherand rolled our eyes everytime she switch slides and it was more mass spectra on the most unisnpiring grey background............I wanted to go smack her and send her to jail and force her to take two terms of COMM before letting her back out...........

Five-day Break

So starts a five-day break.

I have been temporarily relieved from the daunting task of staring at hondybee cells under that glaring light of the microscope, hoping those hopelessly oblivious cells might catch a glimpse of my eye through the scope and be encouraged to increase in numbers. Yet being ejected from the lab for two days only equates to being ushered into the largely unexplored world of proteomic conferences. I'm certain the presenters will be able to inspire a sense of wonder provoke thought - wondering what on earth he is talking about and thinking of where to grab a bite to eat after she's done XD

on a more solemn note, I have managed to incur more charges on my credit card than I currently have available in my bank account. Definitely not the best predicament to be in the midst of, and one that I do not intend to repeat ever again, but I am fully expected to receive my first installment of payment from UBC on the 23rd......(tho i must admit, this situation is technically not true. I do have funds in my Tax-free Savings Account, but I just consider them immoveable)

21 Pages into the Work Term

So, after 6 days of work, I have finished writing in the 21st pages of my lab notebook and will be starting on page 22 tmr........yes, quite the achievement, i must say, especially seeing the other co-op students are much further back in their page numbers (as of Friday there was one to be proud to be on his second page XD)

but this week will be quite interesting =P......we'll be missing Thursday and Friday because of the proteomics conference (tho i have to admit, what I'm working on really has nothing to do with proteomics XD)....so Marta said we'll go to the farm next week to get eggs (especially considering it has been raining and the bess dont like their nests being pried into when it rains)

but asides from that, a little update on my teeth =P......I'm assuming all wounds have closed by now, because i managed to get a hard piece of samosa lodged in one of the holes where a tooth used to be and had to rinse it out......and it didnt bleed (it didnt hurt either, it just felt really uncomfortable).....so i'm assuming it's healing (tho i was told to wait a month for the gum to grow back, and they grow from the inside to fill the hole, so looks like it can swallow food on its own accord for the next little while

and one final note was that i actually had the time to fiddle a bit on my piano......i must say, my piano playing has gotten very very disgusting.......my technique is sooo rusty.....I couldnt even play my broken chords evenly....that was how bad it is.......needless to say when it came to the actual pieces it was horrific.......I was very sad about how my mozarts went.......I actually used to be able to play mozart well, like actually well, with clean trills and the right articulation style and a sublte touch of pedal......not anymore.....T__T.......i completely massacred even the simplest mozart piece.........and then I moved on to some Brahms, and then Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu (which I can't really play anymore.....the right hand just kinda fused into one giant blob of notes).....and I also felt adventurous and attempted some of Lizst's la Campanella........I've actually quite completely lost that piece......I can't play it anymore.......I think I've only managed to go up to the half of the first page (and that's the simplest bit XD).......so yes, I need more practice, and get my technique back to where it was (and maybe some Czerny along with it too XD)

Day 4 (Man, i need more creative titles XD)

So, how goes the fourth day on the job? =P.....i must say i was pretty proud of myself =P

today was quite the contrary to what happened yesterday. Whereas i kept thinking I really didn't do anything at all yesterday, i found myself very oddly productive today =P.....I was done my list of things to do (like prep media, do more sterility tests) by 10:30....and was twiddling my thumb till 11:30 waiting for the pH meter to free up so i can finish the last thing on my list to do.

But really, my proudest thing has to be my aseptic techniques......I was actually rather unhappy about the fact that we were having trouble with the media and it kept getting contaminated....the first time, fine, i wasnt careful enough and was being sloppy.......the second time was like WHAT?! again?!........so when i looked at it today for the third time and saw that oh-so-familiar film of growth on the surface my heart sank, thinking i must have done something terribly stupid and contaminated the stock bottles (which would have wasted $200 worth of materials.....yes, that much for three 500mL bottles of media).....but then when i opened our other incubator to look at that plate (we use two incubators, the nice, new one with has 5%CO2....and the old one that's basically just a heated cupboard) there was no sign of contamination whatsoever......there was not even a speck of a cell to be found under the microscope!!......i was sooo relieved, and I think we can come to the conclusion that the old incubator is contaminated with some yeast kinda thing.........marta, my supervisor, told me let it sit for a while longer, coz there was no signs of growth in one of the medium (Grace's Insect Medium).......only if the last medium is also contaminated can we conclude it's the incubator (tho i cheated and looked at it under the microscope and i can see little cells floating around, just very few of them =P)

we had another scare with contamination today too XD......and again, i'm very proud that it's not my fault =P.......we were reviving the cells from cryopreservation that were cultured last summer to see how well they do in -78C liquid nitrogen.......and so i was using the hemocytometer and trypan blue as i was so used to back in the lab (i must say i'm going to come to hate counting those stupid cells......especially if they all look the way they did today)

me and hemocytometer have met.....we've decided that we really can't get along

and so the first batch was fine (the ones directly out of the cryovials).....but then the ones after dilution with media was absolutely horrific!!!!......instead of having a slide of blue liquid, it just became liquid completely overwhelmed with blue floaty thingies (i was actually going to write that description into my notebook, but then thought it wasnt quite professional)....but bascially think of dust on water, except there's a huge amount and it's all blue......and so marta just flipped and panicked (espeically when we tested the trypan blue alone and it was fine, and then with the media and it clumped)......so she freaked and thought it was very bad bacterial contamination....but she had to run for a meeting, and so she left me to do some research......but then, after some researching, i found that apparently serum (in our case the 20% fetal bovine serum we added) causes this to happen XD (apparently trypan blue has a higher affinity to serum proteins than cellular proteins =P).......and so once more, it was just another harmless scientific phenomenon........tho it does complicate things, i now have to actually test the media to make sure it's the serum's fault, and then this means from now on we'll have to first centrifuge down the cells, take the media out, and replace it with PBS (phosphate-buffered saline)

and i guess the final thing to note is that i think i've found my rhythm with the whole co-op business.....i can get to UBC by 8, do my devotions there before i start my day =P (using a computer in the SUB, coz i dont think it's quite proper to be using my lab computer to do personal stuff.....though i was using it to secretly check for my marks, which are still not out, seeing tammy sent us all an email saying joan's still hacking away at our protein papers XD)....i quite like this arrangement =P........and maybe if i can pull myself together and sleep earlier then i can actually read on the bus (and not sleep it away =P).........also hopefully once i can properly ingest again i'll bring in some granola bars for an afternoon snack in addition to the sandwich that i have grown to be fond of =P

but anyways, on other news......i now know what's causing this pulling feeling everytime i open my jaws a certain way......apparently my dentist has sewn my gum to the side of my cheeks......but hey, it's ok, it doesnt hurt, and only one more pill of antibiotics left tonight before i'm done with all these medication =P

had an orange flavoured yogurt tonight.....kinda odd =P.....but it actually tasted pretty good =P

BUMPITS and day 3

yes, you heard me, BUMPITS!......you might be wondering, where on earth would you find the bumpit....i mean, the only thing you've really ever heard of was an armpit and maybe a peach pit, where does a bumpit go?......apparently it goes in your hair......it's a little plasticy thingy that you can put inside your hair and wrap hair around to make it all big and full......thus bump-it...........honestly, i think it's some sort of practical joke.....but someone must have a lot of money to spend to put a commercial for such a thing on prime time TV (either that or someone was just seriously stupid when coming up with the name)

Just in case you are stupid, they tell you bumpits are not edible

(btw, i was so tempted to put Figure 1. and then start doing the whole sentence description and the citation thing, but i suppose this isnt COMM XD)

but well, things have definitely started to pick up for day 3. Quite honestly if you get me to list out everything I've done for the day it really wasnt much.....we found contamination in the plates and so we redid them, and found contamination again (we are thinking it may either be from the media or from the incubator.....we didnt get time today so we'll have to do that tmr.....i really hope the contamination is not from the bottle.....coz that would suck.....).....and that was bascially it, made some antibiotics (it was very very interesting trying to shove 1.5g of gentamicin into an eppendorf tube and then dissolving it in 1mL of water.......there was just sooo much solid it wouldnt even fit into the tube)......and we also went to the bee farm to try to collect some eggs........and yah, that was interesting.....coz i'm actually rather afraid of bees but it turned out ok......and i also got my keys =P


i can now access the lab without having to wait for the doors to be open, and i can also head into MSL with the electronic fob and the you're-allowed-to-be-here piece of fabric (or well, i suppose it is to put the set of keys around your neck, but i always like to pocket my keys so i dont really find them useful)

but well, i'm actually surprised at the pace of it all......i was actually very used to the whole finish-everything-quickly mentality, so performing acrobatic stunts to save the prodcuts from dripping into the water bath in a chem lab was all part of the plan.......but i suppose real science is a bit more delicate than that, and it's ok to take your time and test things out and just generally slow down to do things well.......but i dunno, i'm starting to have second thoughts on the whole Ph.D. idea......maybe i'll do something that hinges less on being completely anal about asceptic techniques.....(yes, it is rather disheartening to have to be stalled by contaminated media that starts growing things when you didnt even seed anything to begin with)

anyways, in other news, my teeth see to be doing fairly well......i was actually abel to sustain a small period of normal chewing today during dinner........but then the left side of my jaw is starting to ache.......so i dunno if that's just from overworking, from the nerves healing, or from an infection......i guess we'll have to wait and find out

Day 2

so.....how goes the second day, you ask?.....well, definitely more eventful than the first =P.....the morning was spent doing something relatively simple....aliquotting media, then plating them into 6-wells for a pH and sterility test tmr. After that came some checking out books from the library ("Insect Physiology and Biochemistry".....wonderful, i know....), and the afternoon was spent reading and researching and more article reading and more researching (it was ridiculous how difficult it was to find the pH of honeybee hemolymph.....basically honeybee blood....)

we were also going to thaw some fetal bovine serum (FBS, should sound disgustingly familiar to any biotechers reading this XD).....but then we took them out to late and so it didnt thaw in time for me to aliquot before heading home, so we put it back in the freezer until tmr........and after that checked the trypan blue (another awfully familiar term) to make sure there are no strange floaties (another concept we are very familiar with) with the hemocytometer (this word is almost obscene XD)

I did see Billy tho =P......i now know which lab he works in coz I saw him through the window as I passed by Michael Smith Labs (MSL)........speaking of which, the keys to the NCE building as well as the lab is ready for me to pick up, and i should also go get the little electronic key-tab thing to the MSL.......also for tmr we'll be reviving some previously cryopreserved cells and do a viability count (i can hear Joan say the exact same words.....)

but anyways, on a happier note, i was reunited with my trusty umbrella today =P......it was waiting to greet me at the elevator doors =P (it must have missed me very much =P)......and also in terms of my anti-starvation experiment, I was silly enough to buy a pink coloured powerade today instead of a juice. Although I think powerade serves a better function than juice, the choice of flavour was quite horrible.......I should have known better......I thought pink would be an innocent colour for strawberry lemonade, but as it turns out it's a very cleverly disguised antibiotic flavour (why, oh why did i not notice that the contents were of the same colour)......all that's missing are grainy medicine chunks.........but in terms of lunch I managed to scale up to a large soup (cream of mushroom today =P)......so i was not as light-headed coming home as i was yesterday.......

and the best part yet?!! I managed to pseudo-chew for dinner!!!! =P had little bits of of cut-up chicken and BBQ pork with my rice in steamed eggs!!!.....so proud......tho hopefully i was not too ambitious, coz afterwards my mom took a look into my mouth and apparently there's a "hole" where my teeth used to be........>__<"......that completely grossed me out......

Day 1 at Foster's Lab

The lab itself is actually a pretty big one. They have 4 new co-op students including me for the summer and they are actually in the middle of expanding into new rooms and getting things set up (or well, the full story is that all the previous people moved into the Michael Smith Labs next door and so they are now claiming all the space that they left behind).....but i must say, i dont think i'm quite used to this whole new lab environment, and i dont mean it in so much the layout, but the whole laid-back-ness of it all.....having gotten used to 12 hours a week of here's-the-lab-let's-blitz-through-it-in-1.5-hours, i find this whole we-have-four-months thing rather weird.....

but let's start at the very beginning, shall we?.....i must say, of all the other co-op students around i think i got landed the better job =P whereas everyone is kinda picking things up from the middle of an experiment that their supervisor is working on, I actually get to work with mine on something completely fresh and new =P.....yes, i know it's cell culture, but it's all from scratch......they dont have some commercially prepared cell lines we can use, so we'll actually be starting them from eggs.....and the coolest part? no one has ever succeeded in doing something like this before =P (there is apparently somethign that makes honeybee cells notoriously difficult to grow long-term, and no one has yet discovered the reason XD)......but anyways, i digress =P

the day started with a rather long lab meeting with two presentations (and Joan has managed to haunt me even more! as if cell cultures weren't enough, there was talk of the MAPKKK and mTor and phosphotyrosines...>__<").....and then an EXTREMELY long lab tour......(we spent a disgustingly long time with the autoclave, and all i could think of is that it looks eeriely similar to the old one we had in the lab.....but apparently this one actually steams the entire room if it's closed improperly XD)

yah, nothing much after that, i actually feel like i wasted an entire day doing nothing.......i was sitting at my desk on my computer reading through some papers and making some notes on what needs to be done tmr......and then reading through the same papers again and looking at the same notes........though tmr was promised to be more interesting........a trip to the UBC farm where the bees actually are (rather scared about that, not a big fan of bees, tho i was assured we won't get stung with the bee suit on).....and then a trip to the dollar store to look for something we can scoop bee eggs with......and then actually prepping the solutions and media......actual lab stuff finally!

But there is one problem that I am rather keen on solving........how not to starve............it sucks to not be able to eat properly.......i bascially lived off a bottle of juice and a small bowl of soup all day.........AND i was running low on water........as a result i was so light-headed and out of it that i managed to leave my umbrella in the washroom, missed a bus, waited for 5 minutes BEFORE realizing i don't have my umbrella, going back to the lab only to find the doors locked (and i dont yet have the building keys), and had to walk back all the way to the bus loop, hungry and miserable, only to miss a second bus.........