Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Phage Lab Thus Far


For many of us Phage Labbers, this has been the first time that we have truly been thrust out into the world of science without really having any idea what the outcome would be at the end of our journey. For the first time, questions arose that didn't necessarily have clear cut answers, and at that point we all heard the resounding words of Dr. Denver's coined phrase, "That's Science." Although some of us may have forgotten how we arrived where we are today, analyzing the base pairs of the Colbert genome, others are reminded of the hours a week we spent in Fall Term. Occasionally up to 7 hours a day for a few of the ambitious ones. The countless number of titrations, purification rounds, etc. that led us all where we are today. I, personally, feel quite lucky that although as a class we had a few minor setbacks, we really have gotten the job done quite nicely. Everyone stepped up when they needed to, and in the end, although only one phage was chosen to be sequenced, we were all able to make our own contributions. I just thought I would take some time to encourage people to look back the long path that we've traveled over this year. Think back to our dough-eyed expressions trying fervently to decide whether to choose the manure pile or the recycling bin. It's been a truly outPHAGEous class, wouldn't you agree?

--Erica

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Lab This Week

This week was Jamboree week. We got to present all of our annotated genome segments to the class and add them to the main file. This will allow us to ask the class if they agree with what we called and put all the called genes onto one genome.

We only got through a couple group presentations (maybe half) so next week will probably be the same. It is rather difficult to make this part of the class interesting because we're going through each gene called at a time, and explaining our reasoning.

Hope everyone is enjoying the weather,
Tamsen.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

First Post

This is the first post in the genomics blogs.

Using this to let me know how to set up the template. :)

- Tamsen.