Hello from the lab on a Friday afternoon. Friday afternoons in the lab can be surprisingly pleasant, although I’m probably just in a good mood because I have had a good data day, which tends to come few and far between.
For starters, the project we’ve been working on all semester in my molecular genetics class has culminated in successful CRISPR mutants that we did ourselves, as undergraduates. This is a pretty big deal! For those of you that haven’t heard of CRISPR, it’s this super cool technology that essentially allows you to purposefully “mess up” any gene you’re interested in, so that you can prevent it from being expressed as a protein and see how it contributes to physiological function. CRISPR has huge ramifications for research because it makes studying the functions of specific genes really easy. It even has the potential to “fix” disease causing mutations in human embryos.
My mutants <3
For our class, we’re mostly looking at a gene involved in the growth of root hair tips in moss, called COW1, short for “can of worms” because that’s kind of what the root hairs of COW1 mutants look like. We had hoped to get some interesting mutants out of CRISPR so we could examine how each of our different forms of the COW1 gene contributes to tip growth. And we got some really cool mutations! Even some mutants for multiple forms of the COW1 gene! We were all kind of grinning like idiots by the end of looking at our moss DNA sequences. Baby’s first CRISPR: success!
Our professor was understandably pretty stoked with our results and so she actually had us celebrate with champagne and chocolate (bonus of taking a 300-level class for seniors: we’re all 21). We thought she was joking when she said she had champagne in her office, but we found ourselves laughing as “We Are the Champions” played on Spotify to celebrate our CRISPR success. It was honestly one of my favorite memories from this year.
Note the styrofoam ice container, normally for samples, today for champagne. Plus the pom poms are “phosphates” from our presentation the other week 😉
Skål! *we are the champions plays in the background*
Now, I’m at the Brigham in Boston, where after two weeks of a somewhat disappointing lack of transfer on my Western blots, I finally got a good transfer result, if not a perfect one. A lot of the time in science, things don’t work and we have no idea why, which makes days like this one all the more special.
Ever lovely yours,
Eleanor