Random Saturday

I’m watching an episode of Hell’s Kitchen (on Hulu) while I wait for my friends to pick me up, and seriously I would love to be a fly on the wall to see how the producers generate so much drama in such a short amount of time. Maybe I will find out if I ever hear back from King of the Nerds! I’m also shocked when I see how OLD some of the people on the show look when they are the same age as me! I still get carded and mistaken for an undergrad on campus, but some of these people look … I mean I guess the best way to describe it is they have probably not taken very good care of themselves over the last few years. On a related topic, the girl’s team was given a plate full of sheep testicles to eat during their punishment (they lost the challenge), and Kimmie (who despite the dainty, girly name is nothing of the sort)  keeps bragging about how she downed 5. I’m not sure that is something to be proud of…? And of course the narrator made a joke about how things were starting to get “testy” in the kitchen when the girls started arguing. I’ll admit I still have enough of a 7th grader on the inside to snicker at it.

So, I am also starving, so I made my own vanilla greek yogurt. I love vanilla yogurt – but all the junk in the store is STUFFED with sugar. Even the stuff that is supposed to be healthy has sugar in it, or even worse Artificial Sweetener! My husband came home with a giant tube of Fage last week and so I scooped out about half a cup (and a scoop for Puppenshmirtz because he loves it) and added about 5 drops of vanilla extract and 4 drops of Vanilla Stevia. Mix, mix, mix and eat! I think it tastes awesome! You still get the tanginess of the greek yogurt with a slight sweetness from the stevia (don’t add too much though because it is very sweet!) and the vanilla flavor. Individual servings of greek yogurt can run you anywhere from $1.5-2 (not to mention the future cost of healthcare when I get metabolic syndrome from all the freaking SUGAR in them).

In other news – I’m attempting this protocol at work called a Co-Immunoprecipitaton (or more commonly in our lab a pull down)- we have tiny beads that have antibodies for GFP (green fluorescent protein for all my non-science readers) which binds to the protein I’m working with which I have tagged with a YFP (yellow fluorescent protein). Now when I  incubate the beads in the “juice” of the cells that I’m working with, the YFP tagged protein binds to the antibodies on the beads – and any proteins that interact with my protein will bind to it! Then I can run out the proteins on a gel to see which proteins bind to my protein. This is the second time I have tried this process, the first time I did it was practice as far as I was concerned, but this time was supposed to be for all the marbles.

I start off by flash-freezing the tissue samples with liquid Nitrogen (which if you have never experienced – is fun to work with because it creates these billowing cold fog-clouds across the floor) and then grinding it to a fine powder with a mortar and pestle. I use the liquid Nitrogen to chill the whole shebang – including the spatula and the eppie tube I transfer the powder and a lysis buffer into. After doing all of this prep for all five of my samples (which took about 2 hours because I have to prep the buffers, mass and freeze the tissue, grind, and then transfer) I go to put my samples in the centrifuge (which spins the tubes and uses centripetal acceleration to separate items in the tube by mass) only to discover that it is BROKEN. Sad. I stuck the samples in the -80 freezer and I am crossing my fingers that on Monday I can find a working centrifuge and that my samples aren’t completely ruined.

I only have a 3 weeks left before I leave my current lab before I start graduate school and I’m trying to get as much work done as possible before then, so I really hope I didn’t set myself back by 8 days (time it takes to grow a new set of plants for the tissue)