Old plates

Hurray! I need some antibiotic plates for a bacterial transformation later on in the day, but found out that a) the plates I have are getting on for 6-weeks old, b) I didn't have any bottles of sterile media made up, and c) there was no bacto-agar left. So I had a quick online rummage of Bitesized Bio, a site where scientists exchange technical tips and flag up new techniques, to see what the BBD (best-before date) for antibiotic plates were. My old supervisor always said 1 month, but it appears that my 6-week old veterans don't have to draw their pension just yet.

I also had a quick rummage through the plate stocks in the cold room, and there are some from last autumn, whilst several stacks are 4 months+. And those are the ones on the front shelves. I'm sure if I look hard enough I'll find some from the last millenium, maybe with weird and wonderful strains of bacteria on them.

Work during the World Cup

My company has been quite 'understanding' about allowing us to go and watch the World Cup games. They've even opened the pavilion-bar with the wide-screen tv so that people can go and watch the games they want - as it has quite an international community a lot of the games have been shown, but for the England-Slovenia game (being played right now) my department resembles the Marie Celeste....

The office areas

The lab

Amazing given that it's only the first round, nowhere near the finals. Though it may be the 'final' game for England in the World Cup this year - let's hope that they play better than they did last week.

Allergies

To put it mildly, it can be a little awkward when you develop an allergy to your test material.

Having just spent a couple of hours leaning over barley plants, trying to take photos of the leaves and the various symptoms that different cultivars produce in response to virus infection, I've found that an itch has emerged as my very own symptom to the plants, around the neck and wrists. Do you know the kind - the 'hot' irritated area of skin?

I should have known I would be allergic to barley plants. A few years ago I spent a summer working with flowering barley and barley ears - it gets a lot worse around anthesis time. When I came back with my samples my eyes would be streaming. It didn't help that I then had to patiently dissect out each barley grain by hand, with my eyes straining to see. Of course, I did realise it was the barley that set me off, but I didn't expect to have a reaction to the plants prior to anthesis.

As a lot of my work will be with barley, I can hardly avoid it. I will just have to wear gloves and take anti-histamines if needs be. No wonder they told me to go to the Occupation Health unit at the hospital and take regular lung function tests.

I can't wait until hayfever season.

anti-sense. The antithesis of sense.

I have just spent several days designing primers to amplify bits of DNA from wheat genomic DNA. Lots of days looking at AGTCGTCGTAA and other such sequences.
Now I've just realised that I want the antisense sequence so I have to start all over again.
AAARRGGGGGHHHHHHH
(or should it be AAATTGGGGGCCCCCCC?)

PS this post is unlikely to make sense to any non-molecular biologists. But I'm happy to share the bewilderment.

Weekend reading

When you receive a densely-typed, 17-page long, document from your supervisor to peruse at 4:52 on a Friday evening, and he says 'have a nice weekend' at the end of the accompanying e-mail, it probably indicates that he has a highly developed sense of humour. Good to know that.

Day 1: Job Hunt (Hunting for the place in which I have a job)

First day at work today - there was a bit of a hiccup actually getting to work as I appeared to have misunderstood the bus timetable and no bus arrived. Luckily I still have my parents' car, which I 'borrowed' to help me move my things to my new sticks. Surprisingly too, I wasn't late, although I didn't have a clue how to get there by car. Hurray for a semi-decent sense of direction!

Today was mostly paperwork, meetings, paperwork, reading literature - oh and more paperwork. I was introduced to so many people that after a while I gave up on remembering names. Most of them seemed to have been informed of who I was beforehand, so it was 'hi, you must be Sam' and from my side 'err.... yes, nice to meet you', before they disappeared without dropping the syllables of their name into the air between us.....

So, all seems new to me, other than the lab itself - a bit bigger and shared between groups, but the instruments and arrays of chemicals on the shelf are reassuringly familiar.