My experience as an intern during week 3

          My third week working in the lab was great. I was happy to start working and getting my hands on the pipetters. We were introduced to the technique optimized for the expression of the protein in E. coli BL21 starr cells to grow batches of bacteria. I enjoyed seeing how the equipment at the institute has facilitated the smooth progress of experiments. Personally, I was thrilled to learn a new technique that assist in lysing cells open. There is a pressure homogenizer to lyse cells open, never before had I seen one, since I am most familiar with the use of the sonicator. We also worked on our first presentation related to the project. Dr. Pellecchia even gave us feed back via e-mail. It was great to get suggestions from abroad. As soon as we completed the expression of the protein of interest we ran the sample on an SDS PAGE. Unfortunately, our protein expression did not go s planned, we did not get the results we expected.

          Presentations went well. Personally, both Jose and I identified some areas of improvement and got some ideas from the other presenters. In respect to the other presenters, I just have some comments that I think will help the audience understand the information. Some of the explanations should be somewhat simpler and please label graphs, charts and diagrams. Some slides did not contain titles on their figures or axis and this was somewhat confusing. Including this sort of information would really come handy, because the audience will have more time to focus on what you are delivering instead of attempting to decipher what the graphs are representing.