Summary of work so far.

So I realize I might be starting this blog a little late, since I've already worked for about 4 weeks, however I feel I can adequately summarize what I have done so far. I'm writing this post with a understanding that most people reading it will have a background in science, however if you don't know something or feel something is unclear feel free to ask!! I have decided to break it up into two sections as follows...

"Bench Work" Aspect

Week 1-2
- Spent most of my time in the lab's student office reading scientific articles relating to my labs principle interest.
Learned a few techniques such as:
- E. Coli transformation (i.e. getting an E. Coli cell to uptake a plasmid) 
- plasmid mini prep (i.e. harvesting plasmid from transformed E. Coli). This involves using a "kit" which is basically just a set of prepared solutions and elution columns that make harvesting plasmid easy. The aim of this process is to obtain a "stock" of plasmid which I can subsequently use for other experiments where I will ligate "MFG" into the plasmid, then transform E. Coli with the plasmid and get them to express "MFG"
- Gel extraction (i.e. taking a band out of a agarose electrophoresis gel and retrieving the DNA contained inside). I will use this technique at various points throughout my project to purify DNA
- DNA digestion with restriction enzymes

Week 3-4
- So basically for the last 2 weeks I have been trouble-shooting the above techniques to obtain optimal yield for each process and to ensure the products I obtained are suitable for further experiments.

Non "Bench Work" Aspect

What really surprised me is the amount of time my lab spends in what I would call "professional development". We spend about 6-8 hours a week doing various activities such as "journal club" (where one student presents a critique of a predetermined scientific article and subsequently the entire lab discusses the paper), going to talks where prominent guest speakers present their current research and attending conferences devoted to one topic where various guest speakers present their work and students present posters of their current work.