Day 10 - Final Lab Procedure with DaWei

Next we followed DaWei

DaWei's PAGE gel which has been shown in the previous post.

It has been destained and he washed it with water.

The cleaned sample is then placed between two sheets of clear plastic

 The gel is then taken to be scanned so that the results can be saved and further analysed at his own time.

After that he takes it back to the lab. He then transfers it to a sealed plastic bag and placed in a fridge. Thus is so that he can check again on the sample should he have any doubts

Day 8 - More on chromatography

Today we follow DaWei's friend Fu Jing on her tests. She carefully pipettes minute amounts into a small vial. Then using a centrifuge, she seperates the suspended denatured protein. The appear at the bottom of this machine.

However the interesting part of the machine is that it makes use of the centrifugal force in high speed spinning, this moves the suspended solution to the bottom of the vial. 

Next, Fu Jing uses ( 1-directional ) gel electrophoresis on the the solute which she took and dyes them. This is PAGE (Polyacrylamide Gel Electrophoresis). It eliminates then different charges of the different proteins and actually seperates them through different molecular weight. Smaller ones moves faster, while the bigger one moves faster. Thus you will be able to see different bands on the ladder.

She has to carefully pipette the solute as the ladder is very small, less than 1 cm in width and less than 0.5 mm in thickness

The gel will later be taken out in 1-2 hours time. Then it will be taken out and destained overnight in a box.

The machine controlling the voltage.

Her previous work which had already gone through PAGE.

Current work in progress.....

 Next we followed DaWei.

He took 1 micro litre of enzymes and 20 micro litre of proteins and mixes them together. The enzyme-substrate then converts the long protein chains into two separate proteins, meaning a cleavage was done here. 

Mixtures are then left overnight in a 4 degree Celsius Refrigerator. This is because the proteins are very delicate and could possibly decompose at room temperature if left overnight.

Day 7 - Following Mentor's Fellow Colleagues

We have been following our mentors for 7 days!

Today, LiHong was a little busy with her work and so, we shadowed her friend Fujing for the day. Fujing is a new PhD student and she has been working with proteins too. She brought us into the lab and showed how she was going to (hopefully) bind alpha and gamma proteins together. After she mixed both type of proteins together, she continued to carry out dialysis like what Dawei did. 

Interestingly, Paul (another researcher) came in and talked to us. He introduced two-dimensional gel electrophoresis which, is a step to separate proteins according to their isoelectric point and molecular mass. In the medical field, he said, 2D gel electrophoresis can be applied to identify unusual proteins in a brain like the analysis of brain proteins in brain cancer compared to normal brain cells. Soon after we were left wandering in the lab, observing others. 

To end off:

Research is a repetitive process and it demands patience. It could take up days to weeks or even months to obtain a desirable result. Nevertheless, the rewards are fruitful as the gain in more knowledge is truly enlightening.