Update from Paris

June 10, 2013

Today I am back in the lab at Cachan. I know you are eagerly awaiting my post that summarizes my microbiology experiment, but I am still working on it. I am struggling with the specific vocabulary needed for my microbiology report, and how to describe the experiment in the simplest way.

This morning started with our weekly lab meeting. I told the group where I was at in my project, and how I am structuring my last three weeks. Eliza (the PHD student who I am working under) and I sent off our DNA insert for sequencing early this week. As far as I understand it, ‘sequencing’ means that the a separatelab will analyze the structure of the base paris in the sample that we sent off, which will allow is to know if we inserted our promoter correctly into the chromosome in the cell. When we hear back from the sequencing lab we will run some experiments using flowimetery and flowcytometetry. I will make graphs and data to analyze, and then write a report that describes my entire science experiment. I also described to the group how I need to finish designing my section of ‘broader impacts’ for Bianca’s website, and how I will continue with my posts (including a some longer blog posts on epistemic values, ID/TD in Paris and my science report).

Then on August 1st I will have a week vacation in Greece! When I return I will spend few months writing an article, which I hope to submit to Social Epistemology in late September. This article will also be the final report that I send to Bianca and Reed College. It will be around 7000 words in length and it will tell the narrative of my internship in terms of the three major themes: epistemology, broader impacts and ID/TD studies. That should conclude my practicum in the philosophic implications behind scientific research. However, my blog might continue! I am hoping that this fall I will work with CRI, and I could continue blogging about my interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary experiences. I will know more about this after a meeting that I have in a few weeks.

Anyways, back to the group meeting. Once I finished explaining my progress, one of the new students in the lab gave a PowerPoint presentation on her first week of research. She is studying biofilms! She showed us pictures of how bacteria grow in different mediums at several different time intervals. It was really interesting, and Bianca and Eliza suggested some new directions for her project.

After the meeting I began my experiments for the day. Since the P5 promoter is off being sequenced, Eliza and I returned to try to clone the promoter rrnBP1 long. We are starting a few steps back by first inserting rrnBP1 long into the plasmid, Pgem, and then we will try to successfully insert the rrnBP1 long promoter into Pkk (another plasmid). I had a successful digestion of rrnBP1 long into Pgem, so afterwards I did the digestion again but with a larger scale of material. After the digestion I used a mini-prep kit to extract the gel from the digestion, recording the concentrations of both the Pkk and the promoter rrnBP1 long. Afterwards I did a ligation and transformation and then plated the cells so that colonies of bacteria could grow over night.

Tomorrow I will see if I have any colonies and then proceed with a PCR. It was a full day in the lab, and tomorrow will be too. However, on Friday I am attending a workshop at CRI. It should be really interesting. There will be speakers from all over Europe and America discussing ID/TD in education and research!

A demain,

axio

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