04/16/14

Last Wednesday, I was yet again very busy as there was a lot my mentor had planned for me. The highlight of today however was that she took me on a field trip to RPI. There we entered the lab as there was a particular very expensive machine (blanking out on the name) with which she wanted to run a filled test tube. This took me back to my junior internship with capillary electrophoresis. Put simply, she explained to me that within the test tube were certain protein strands and that this machine would churn out a graph filled with peaks indicating the particular proteins. This is my mentor's latest project and I believe she is aiming to label and find out the particular proteins that are beneficial to mycelium growth. The more she explained to me, the more I found out that this was not simply a matter of putting the test tube in the machine and getting automatically useful results. After the graph was printed, she showed me the various peaks and explained that not all of them are useful and that she had to separate the "noise" from the "peaks". Or in other words, only the very noticeable high peaks indicated protein strands while the frequent zig zag looking peaks at the bottom of the graph were useless information created by the default of the machine. In addition, I learned that even if she found seemingly a useful protein strand, she would have to analyze the peak and attempt to match the data of the peak (obtained from the data of the graph) form the data base of proteins and the peaks they make. This truly was a very tedious task and I was awed at how fast she came to matching the peaks of the protein with their names. She told me that after a while, one begins to become familiar with the different peaks and their particular characteristics. Furthermore, what brought false hope were the occasional really high peaks that I thought to be a high level of a particular protein, but found out to be levels of plastic from the test tube bottle--this my mentor told me was inevitable.

All in all, this was something different than my everyday working with touchable large substrates (as this was dealing with small portions of liquids and analyzing data--like that of my internship last year), and it was surprisingly nice to return to old experiences. I learned that rather than investing in large and extremely expensive machines like these, it was far better off to pay RPI money per hourly use until confirmed that this machine was truly beneficial to the further advancement of the company. (It was something like $150 an hour, but taking into account the actual price of the technology (which is probably several hundred thousand if not more...) this is the cheaper option.

Considering that I will be dealing with these types of machines all throughout college (as a biochemistry major), it was nice getting acquainted with the technology beforehand. :)