Despite a few efforts to get others to write in this space, my face from that CNN.com article is still at the top of the page a month and a half later. So I decided to share some of the cool things happening in the lab right now as a way to bump it down and highlight the hard work of my students and colleagues.
Dana Ahern and Antoine Dejong are both becoming mouse experts: they are working on my collaboration with Dr. Gregory Freund, Head of Pathology here at Illinois, looking at behavioral effects of progesterone.
Sophia Bodnar and Emily Marzolph, with Laura Klein, are starting to get together the resources we will need to run a large study in the spring to look at differences in circulating and excreted C-reactive protein.
Theresa Emmerling and Ashley Higgins, both graduates of LEE but still members of our lab group, have been working with me to develop a project to collect narratives from women about their experiences with hormonal contraceptives.
Mark Grabowski is RAing for me this semester and has been plugging away at the University of Saskatchewan collaboration analyses. He has been using some statistical methods with which I am completely unfamiliar, so I am glad to be learning a lot from him. He has already begun to find some very interesting relationships between C-peptide and endometrial thickness -- stay tuned as we figure out more!
Laura Klein is working away at graduate school and NSF GRF applications. Of course, she is also starting to get together the materials necessary for our study of cortisol, stress, and sonography. We are re-running some samples from my dissertation to see if cortisol is elevated on the days women had transvaginal ultrasounds, to test the assumption that these ultrasound are stressful.
Talia Melber is working on grant applications and her dissertation proposal. She is also looking at some archived data to see if she can come up with a useful proxy for hormones she is interested in.
Katie Tribble is experiencing a minor setback with a broken wrist, but will soon be able to run some tests on blood spots to make sure that medium will work with our assay kits. She is also applying to med school. For anyone reading: this is a young woman you would be lucky to have as a doctor!
Ashley Voigt has been doing some great work curating my current project files. She is also applying to pharmacy school and has been getting acceptances and interviews galore.
Showing posts with label day in the lab. Show all posts
Showing posts with label day in the lab. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Friday, July 31, 2009
Assays and Buffers and Gnomes... Oh My!
ETA: To all the folks who were trying to comment: we now allow all comments, not just registered users. Share some gnome names before we narrow it down for a vote later this week!
As Kate has mentioned, LEE has had some roadblocks since its grand opening. While (fortunately) much of what we do here runs smoothly, we are still encountering some funky results. Thus, we dedicate this post to describing the many ways in which we cope, as research assistants, with these roadblocks. Any research project will have its bumps and moments that make you just stop and wonder how on earth that could have happened. Often it’s just a matter of addressing the basic assumptions about your project or methods. This is what we, Kate’s fabulous research assistants, have been doing for the past few weeks by systematically testing every step within our methods. And while we may not, as noted earlier, get our answers within the time frame of a 60 minute TV show - we look just as good pipetting in our white lab coats as any of those television scientists!
Our testing has resulted in a number of exciting breakthroughs - we are quickly eliminating what may cause some of our problems. But as we narrow down the suspect list, we often find whole new challenges to overcome - such as the fun day when after spending a large amount of time on an assay it turned out that one of the assay components was simply defective. This was a particularly frustrating day, but Kate was able to laugh it off as “lab goblins.”
This got us thinking: We need to guard against lab goblins and their mischief. The answer? A lab gnome, of course! Similar to the garden variety, but instead of protecting your house from mischievous beings it protects your lab from everything from quirky kit components to disappearing stir-bars, pens, and other small objects that kleptomaniac lab goblins find irresistible. We were able to quickly acquire our new lab gnome (everyone should keep a spare around the house), but now it needs a name fitting of its job of lab protector. So now, we, the fabulous research assistants, are asking you, the fabulous blog readers, to suggest a name for our gnome! We will take suggestions in the comments, choose our favorites, and put it to a vote in a follow-up post.
Can you name our gnome?
As Kate has mentioned, LEE has had some roadblocks since its grand opening. While (fortunately) much of what we do here runs smoothly, we are still encountering some funky results. Thus, we dedicate this post to describing the many ways in which we cope, as research assistants, with these roadblocks. Any research project will have its bumps and moments that make you just stop and wonder how on earth that could have happened. Often it’s just a matter of addressing the basic assumptions about your project or methods. This is what we, Kate’s fabulous research assistants, have been doing for the past few weeks by systematically testing every step within our methods. And while we may not, as noted earlier, get our answers within the time frame of a 60 minute TV show - we look just as good pipetting in our white lab coats as any of those television scientists!
Our testing has resulted in a number of exciting breakthroughs - we are quickly eliminating what may cause some of our problems. But as we narrow down the suspect list, we often find whole new challenges to overcome - such as the fun day when after spending a large amount of time on an assay it turned out that one of the assay components was simply defective. This was a particularly frustrating day, but Kate was able to laugh it off as “lab goblins.”
This got us thinking: We need to guard against lab goblins and their mischief. The answer? A lab gnome, of course! Similar to the garden variety, but instead of protecting your house from mischievous beings it protects your lab from everything from quirky kit components to disappearing stir-bars, pens, and other small objects that kleptomaniac lab goblins find irresistible. We were able to quickly acquire our new lab gnome (everyone should keep a spare around the house), but now it needs a name fitting of its job of lab protector. So now, we, the fabulous research assistants, are asking you, the fabulous blog readers, to suggest a name for our gnome! We will take suggestions in the comments, choose our favorites, and put it to a vote in a follow-up post.
Monday, June 15, 2009
LEE: not CSI, not NCIS, not even Bones
So far, the LEE has gotten off to a slow start. We are still buying equipment (let's measure out buffer components -- wait, we don't have a balance!) and still waiting on some samples to arrive. Our plan is to run C-reactive protein (measures inflammation) and C-peptide (measures energy availability) assays on archived samples from our fantastic colleagues at the University of Saskatchewan (learn more about the project here). But in the meantime, the ever-fabulous research assistants Talia and Laura have managed to get some good work done by practicing on archived urine samples from Poland.
And the results of said assays were pretty funky, which is why things have gotten slow. It turns out that we will need to do a purification method on our urine samples before measuring for C-reactive protein -- more on this when we've refined the method.
We don't get to know the answers to our questions in a forty-two minute show (or even sixty minutes, as I imagine Abby from NCIS works her way through commercials). And we hit methodological or technological roadblocks fairly often. This means we spin our wheels from time to time in academic science. But despite a bit of a wait on some equipment and supplies that will arrive in another day or so, there is plenty more to do, from keeping on top of the literature, to taking classes or working on the dissertation in the case of my RAs, to revising a manuscript and grant and collaborating on a symposium proposal in my own case.
Of course, at the end of the summer we'll have some interesting data to show for it.
- They have taken a crash course on sampling methods and enzyme immunoassays... at least, that's the nice way to describe the information with which I bombarded them.
- They have pipetted water. And done it some more.
- They have learned how to use the plate washer, reader, and reader software.
- They have run a C-reactive protein assay using two different protocols on some archived urine samples.
- They have chosen articles for weekly journal club meetings.
And the results of said assays were pretty funky, which is why things have gotten slow. It turns out that we will need to do a purification method on our urine samples before measuring for C-reactive protein -- more on this when we've refined the method.
We don't get to know the answers to our questions in a forty-two minute show (or even sixty minutes, as I imagine Abby from NCIS works her way through commercials). And we hit methodological or technological roadblocks fairly often. This means we spin our wheels from time to time in academic science. But despite a bit of a wait on some equipment and supplies that will arrive in another day or so, there is plenty more to do, from keeping on top of the literature, to taking classes or working on the dissertation in the case of my RAs, to revising a manuscript and grant and collaborating on a symposium proposal in my own case.
Of course, at the end of the summer we'll have some interesting data to show for it.
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