At the beginning of the year I decided to take a 6-hour molecular biology lab course for the winter term, and damn it was tough. As someone who still struggles with time management, and balancing work and school life, it was difficult to keep up.
We had roughly 3-6 exercises/ experiments each week and had to document everything in our lab books; observations, results, calculations, protocol and discussion about our results and what may have gone wrong if we got a bad result. Our experiments ranged in difficulty from learning the basics of micropipettes to PCR and CRISPR. It was an amazing experience to be able to do all these cool things to DNA/RNA/proteins and how they affected microorganisms such as yeast and E. coli. You read and study about these things in class, but to actually see the results of recombinant DNA, using restriction enzymes and CRISPR- Cas9, it’s just so cool!! There were so many things to do, so many reagents that you could easily mess up by add the wrong one at the wrong time, so many tubes to keep track of. It got stressful sometimes, trying to finish the lab early and trying to obtain the best results while working with a lab partner who wasn’t very careful when doing the protocols – not that fun.
On top of the main lab, we had milestones relating to a group project (which was with our lab partner) and worth 12% of our grade. Our group presentation revolved around one of our TA’s research: either comammox bacteria or one involving a molecular mechanism (I can’t quite remember). Me and lab partner got comammox bacteria and our task was to think of a way to determine the percentage of comammox and the uniqueness of the comammox bacteria in an enrichment culture obtained from our colleagues. It was very interesting researching methods to be able to determine both the uniqueness and the percent of comammox bacteria in the culture. There were techniques such as Illumina to sequence the DNA of the culture, and NCBI BLAST to determine the uniqueness. It was fascinating to search up these techniques and to compare the new ones like Illumina to old methods like using 16rRNA and qPCR.
I could go on and on about this, but what I types out here is the general gist of my experience. Overall, it was a hectic and painful experience, but it was totally worth it. I may not have done as well as I hoped, but I learned a lot about myself and about molecular biology. I have so much respect now for those who do this kind of stuff for a living, I’m not sure if I’m fully cut out for molecular biology stuff. Who knows, maybe one day the skills I learned in this lab will by of use.
Noemi’s Corner 