音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

At this noon, as usual, we had a lab meeting.
Steve didn’t show up until 15 minutes after the supposed-beginning-time.
“Where’s Steve?”
“Dunno. Eating?”
It was 14:00 already.

That would be possible. Steve, our supervisor, comes to lab at noon and work till night. Actually, at this noon, 12:00 around, a person came to our lab to look for him.
“He hasn’t come yet. Brushing his teeth.”
LOL!

“So… are we done?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Okay, let’s go back.”
LOL!

“I have an open hour for my TA at 3. I just sit there and do nothing.”
“You can bring your laptop to play games. And if there’s a projector, you can connect it to the screen.”
LOL!

We couldn’t start the meeting if he didn’t show up. Anyway, we talked by ourselves firstly.
A desk outside our lab is a bit large. Steve was considering on changing a smaller one. But there was no suitable ones in our department building…
“So, we can either wait for a new one, or just get rid of the current one right now. However, another way is, we may use a saw, get a piece off in the middle, and then meld the rest parts together. So it becomes smaller!”
“Hmm… sounds not bad. I think I can just cut the legs off, then re-stick them to the smaller-cut desk. You need not cut it off from the middle in this way.
“Hold on, isn’t the desk made of wood? Can you meld it?”
“No, it’s made of metal.”
“Oh, that will be fine.”

“But, what about to use glue but meld them together?”
“What kind of glue may be used in there?”
At that time, Steve came.
“You guys have started to talk?”
“Yeah, we were talking on the desk…” we told Steve about what we just said.
“Hmm… is the desk made of wood? So you can meld it?”
“No, it’s made of metal.”
“Ah, I see.”
LOOL!

Sometimes, the lab meeting can be rather funny!

I think I'm doing my project with a snail speed!
In the past month, since the last week in September, speak in a more exact way, I kept doing PCR day by day. I was glad to do it since I needed not to make more solutions, but I didn't mean I wanted to do the EXACTLY same thing everyday!
Gosh, my PCR didn't work for rather a long period!
Everything seemed alright. I didn't think I can even make mistakes on weighting stuff and put it into water according to the desired concentration. I adjusted my solutions to the proper pH. I did positive controls of my PCR using others' buffers. But, no matter what I did, my OWN buffer didn't work! What the hell!
I started to doubt everything, even the water I used.
Anyways,
Calm down, water wouldn't be a problem!
I read the recipe again. Hold on! It says “pH 8.4 for Taq buffer, if use pH 7.5 ones, both of Taq and PWO would work......”
Okay, that's the point.
I made some Tris-HCl in pH of 8.4. Then, PCR again...
Gosh, it worked perfectly...
The damn pH-issue cost me almost one month to solve it. Fine, I won't trust all protocols too much from now on... -__-
At least, I confirmed that I was not that bad on making solutions. XDD

Finally, time to try some new experiments. Transcription! Yay~
However, I was a bit nervous on it. I remembered the last time I extracting RNA. It was degraded totally. Fortunately, I only needed a short fragment, thus the degradation didn't matter. However, now it was all about RNA, would my RNA be safely extracted and kept?
I started my transcription. I added my PCR product and all other stuff needed. When I did PCR, all stuff was just DNA-grade. I knew it, yet I still used my PCR product directly in the transcription. Afterwards, I extracted the RNA. I loaded the final purified RNA onto a regular agarose gel. I put the gel into UV...
I saw bands!
My RNAs were all safe! Good!
At that time, I was a bit amazed by the “cleanness” of my lab. I used DNA-grade stuff in RNA-level experiments, and I got what I wanted! That's so wonderful!
Or, would I say it's only because RNAse hasn't found its way to me?

The black kitty was drawn by chance!
Happy Halloween!!

@pixiv