Monday, June 2, 2008

Busy... yet not

So it's been kinda of a weird time in the lab recently - while my microscope is STILL out of commission I have been busy with lots of molecular biology/western blotting stuff. So it hasn't been a total holiday but it has been quieter than normal.

We've been trying very hard to get the Gateway Cloning system up and running but we have run into a few problems - mainly getting our AttB PCR amplifications to work. We've redesigned so of the primers so hopefully that'll work. When I did actually get them to work, VA (our new postdoc) accidentally told me the wrong antibiotic to grow our transformed colonies... so as you can imagine that wasn't very successful! But hopefully once the new primers arrive it'll be onwards and upwards.

Thursday and Friday of last week were pretty hectic as I discovered I had to write an abstract for the ANZBMS conference by Sunday. I spent most of Thursday hurriedly crunching numbers so I could write it up on Friday - however all was in vain as they extended the deadline till next Monday! But at least it's now out of the way. It's currently with AC and I'm sure I'll be receiving my first round of revisions very soon!

The other exciting thing I've been doing is organising my ASBMR conference trip in September. The conference is in Montreal, Canada which is very exciting. I already have my accommodation organised and I'm planning on booking my flights by the end of this week. I discovered that it's going to be cheaper to fly home via New York... which I will definitely be taking advantage of! I've put a reservation on a hotel room in NYC for 3 nights, which is very exciting, hopefully I can
get to visit a lot of famous landmarks while I'm over there. I'm also hoping that I can see a show on Broadway... I really really really want to see Avenue Q - so I may book a ticket in a month or so to go see it while I'm over there.