Research.
Well this is the kind of moment that makes me start doubting whether I can actually be a scientist.I spent 2 weeks altogether growing up cells and treating them with drugs to make the positive and negative controls, collecting the relevant mouse tissues, setting up the new blot system and running the controls twice to make sure that everything works perfectly -
And I thought, oh I will get the answer of that long-standing question TODAY.
Not so much. Not even the controls worked today. Why? I don't know. Maybe I am just not supposed to become a scientist.
I told my PI, I need to go home to rest (yes and I have freaking a lot of other work). So I drove home, tailgated the guy in front, and looked for a policeman when some guy left his car in the middle of the road and blocked my way (usually I will just wait). And slept from like 5 to 7:30.
Then yc came back and I complained to him. He asked me to go out to have dinner together with his friend who came for the weekend - people and food do make me feel less like a loser.
I will go back and see how it goes tomorrow - I re-probed the blot altering some conditions, and hopefully it will work (which it most probably won't). If not, that means another week of delay - and I do not have a lot of time left.
When on earth will I get a conclusion with sufficient support data to start writing my paper?! Maybe I should just go to medical school, get a professional license and take over my family doctor's business. Or, to make it less complicated, just start teaching tuition full-time.
I shouldn't feel good about myself. Whenever I do that, something will go wrong.
Sigh. Developmental biology is like that - it takes a lot of effort and time to get the data I want, especially if I am working on mice. It is a lot slower than cell-line studies, it is slower than flies, and because I need embryos and babies it makes it even more time consuming because I need timed-pregnancies rather than just readily-available adult mice.
I just thought of a way to quantitatively co-relate expressions - the data would be cool and useful, if even necessary - that is, dissociating the mesenchyme and epithelium at different time points, label them with BOTH BMP4 and PTEN abs, and FACS them. But, as soon as I thought about the optimisation - it isn't that good an idea after all, especially when I don't have much time. I will stick to IF for the time being. Actually, for BMP4, I would rather do an in-situ. Never mind...
Labels: Life
