54c tour

today i have absolutely nothing to do in lab. i've been here for two hours (after taing a teachers' lab course since 7:30 this morning) and all that i have done was to start some cultures for tomorrow. it's really lame. poop.

i finally had gotten my experiment to work at the end of last week and sent my newly made plasmids off for sequences. i needed to check that the mutations i had made in the gene were still there, that the rest of the gene had no mutations, and that the stop codon was replaced by an HA-tag. of course, yesterday my sequences came back and looked like poop. like a big stinky pile of poop. dna sequences are supposed to be a series of nucleotides (A, T, G, C) in the order that they appear in the strand of dna that you send out. if the computer can't tell which nucleotide it is, it puts an "N" in that place in the sequence. usually, the very beggining and the very end of a dna sequence are full of "N"s because the computer has issues there. and that's ok because we all know it's going to happen and we prepare for that. this is an example of how 26 out of 28 of my dna sequences looked yesterday:

NNNNNNNNNNNTGNTNNNTGNTNNNNNNNNCTNTCATG
TCGNNANNNACNNNNNNNTANNCATACNGNNNGNNNNN
NNATGANNANANANCGNNGNANNNNNNNNNNNANNNNN
NTNNNNNNNNNNANNNNNNNNCCCNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNANNNNN
NNNNNNNNNTNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNTNNNNNNNANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNCNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNN

poop poop poop poop poop!!!!!!!!!!

send them in for sequencing again because that's indeciferable crap!!!

ugh. so now i have nothing to do today except wait for tomorrow when i will get new sequences back. and they better not be poop or else i will kill people and cry a lot.

in other news, last night we went to silky's in squirrel hill for $2 import beers. awesome. connor drank so much guiness. and tonight is our 54C bar tour of the strip district and south side with a possible stop in oakland. i'm excited. that will be good. and we're ending in the south side at smokin' joe's for 30cent wings and $2 killian drafts. fantastic.

i think i'll go home soon. maybe i'll take a nap and maybe i'll get some coffee. maybe gerrit will cut my hair because that needs to happen.

fluffies are lucky that they get to stay home and sleep all day long.