the Neverending Fall Break

The neverending fall break.  We still have 5 more days off before classes start again!  My mind is boggled but I will not complain.    

I have spent a good portion of this break studying and getting ahead for 2nd term which will undoubtedly start up at 120mph. I guess since we are using the metric system here, it's more accurate to say ~240kmph. 

I'm nearly finished with the longest, most interesting science lab report of my life.  Basically in the lab we isolated the gene that makes jellyfish fluorescent and cloned it into e.coli bacteria so they glowed, too.  After mushing up those poor glowing bacteria like little mashed potatoes, we used a pretty new age machine that read out the bacteria's gene sequence .  That information came out as 760 letter long chain of just G, C, A, and T's.   I put that info into the BLAST, which is a sweet online algorithm tool pioneered in the 1990s by a few brilliant mathematicians who worked for the National Institute of Health.  The algorithm searches super, super, super long DNA sequences just like the one I got from the lab readout (but hundreds of thousands, even millions of letters long),  and helps to find matches.  Unsurprisingly, the gene that we cloned into the bacteria had dna sequence matches with pars of the Victoria jellyfish genome.

We made e.coli glow like this! http://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/green-fluorescent-protein

Now that i'm nearly finished with the lab I feel very proud of my accomplishment!  The whole process did not seem simple at all,  and I had to do a lot of problem solving to understand the mechanisms involved. Honestly,  for a solid few weeks I had no idea what we were even doing.  So it feels good to now be able to put it in my own words.

Besides working on school things,  I have been chipping away at the mountain of to-dos for my physicians assistant school applications.  Research,  writing essays, applying for financial aid, and securing letters of recommendation are just a few of the balls I'm juggling.  The respite from classes is beyond welcomed! 

I'm my favorite personal chef. Today it was garlicky broccoli with tomato, tofu, and rice. 

Words to live by. 

I'm wishing friends and family days of love.  I hope that we all can see the sunshine coming through our deep being.