Today is indeed action day, as promised. In fact, it's action, action day. I really did a lot of experiments and learn a lot from today alone. At 9am, we harvested the cells and extracted the RNA content. Really have to be quite patient here as similar processes are repeated over and over again. Nevertheless, they are necessary. The harvesting and extractin of RNA took about 1hr 45 mins! Next, we used the spectrophotometer to determine the concentration of RNA...quite a lot of calculations involved here. After that, we start to prepare for RT-PCR. The protocol was easy to follow and everything can be done in just one step. The whole process of RT-PCR will take about 3hr 25 mins! this leave me some time to take a rest and to note down everything.
In the afternoon, we started on gel-electrophoresis to separate the DNA fragments. After the gel had set, we "ran" the gel.
At 4pm, we attended a meeting. The meeting was an informal one. Everyone just snack and talk...no pen and paper involoved. Looks like researchers have powerful memory. The meeting was really fun and stress-free. Look forward to next week's meeting.