Christmas in July

This time of year is always a time of change. July 1st is the day the new residents start at the hospital (mortality rates will be up across the nation during July, I am sure) and it is also the day that a lot of the new faculty members start. We had two established members of our department leave this year. It was bad for the department but good for our lab. The reason it was good is that we got to be vultures and pick over the remains of the the labs. Any equipment that was purchased with department funds has to stay here and can be redistributed among any lab that needs/wants it. I figure we scored over $100,000 in equipment including an ultracentrifuge (~50K), two new cell culture incubators, a new biosafety hood, and a large capacity liquid nitrogen storage tank called a cryosafe. The problem with getting this new equipment is getting it all over here and installed. Most of the stuff I can move myself but several things are just too large to move by myself or need to be hooked up to central gas and vacuum lines or need to be plumbed, etc... . This means that I have to put in work orders with the Facility Management Group. Red tape, red tape, and more red tape. Whatever happened to just calling down to the university plumbing office and scheduling a plumber? Heaven forbid it could be that easy. I have three work orders in and only one of them has been responded to. It is taking over a month to get all this done.

Research is going fairly well. I think I have figured out my Merlin cloning problem. I am going to redo the experiment this week to see if my fix works. My fingers are crossed. I will kick myself on one hand for not figuring it out sooner but on the other hand will be doing cartwheels.

Merlin is still a pain in my neck

I took a couple of days last week to finish the Merlin cloning experiement but to no avail. I didn't get any colonies on my LB/amp plates. Not even in the positive controls. I decided to check my vector to make sure it was being digested properly. Yesterday, I did 8 restriction digests in an attempt to figure this out.

This project is my Moby Dick. I have been working on it for so long that I just can't conceive of not finishing it. It has been a real source of irritation. It is a very straight forward cloning experiment that should go off without a hitch - even with the variables that are inherent to biology. I think I have narrowed down the problem to the ligation reaction. I redid the experiment today so I guess I'll see if I solved the problem tomorrow morning if I have colonies on my plates.

My boss has been out of town for the last two weeks and the bulb housing for the mercury bulb in our epifluorescent microscope burned out. This means that all the immunofluorescence experiements for the last week have been put on hold. Unfortunately, nobody told the cells to stop growing and we have had to come up with experiments using assays other than immunofluorescence. Normally this wouldn't be much of a problem but I am not up to date with everybody's progress and therefore don't necessarily know what needs to be done or redone. It has been a real pain in the neck. Marlan is back tomorrow and then starting Friday, I will be out for a week and a half. The break will be nice.