Saturday, July 24, 2010

Sojourns in Manjuland

Today, something very special happened.

We got to visit Manju's lab.

Let me give some background information so as to explain wh
y THIS IS A HUGE DEAL. Dr. Manju Hingorani runs the lab next door, and I think she is kind of enigmatic, and very awesome. She keeps a little tiny tote bag stocked with chocolate hanging on the doorknob of her office, and she's always pacing around with a canteen of loose tea leaves and whispering about DNA. I'm not so sure the admiration is mu
tual, though, because in the past, Manju (who, by the way, INSISTS that everybody, students included, refer to her as Manju and gave me a death look the first [and last] time I referred to her as Dr. Hingorani) has expressed her, um, dissatisfaction with some of the more robustly-vocal-chorded undergrads of the MacQueen Lab
(one is the author of this post and the other has a nickname that rhymes with "gators")
and their propensity for emitting cackles that reverberate into her office. Given this stormy torrid drama of our past, I always thought setting foot into DNALab would be a mere dream, never to be fulfilled...


BUT NAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today after WEAST (which will be blogged about in the near future for those of you not in the know), Tatiana came galloping into our lab proclaiming "ARIEL IS DOING THINGS WITH PRETTY 96-WELL PLATES!!!!!!!!!!!!" Ariel is the awesome undergrad in Manju's lab who, as Esther informed us, placed first in her group in the Middletown 5k!! Anyway, I grabbed my camera and scurried to investigate.




HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!??!?!?!?!?!

More science eye candy:





I know at this point you're probably thinking "Wow, that IS pretty, but what IS it?" (either that or "This girl needs to get out more"), and I am embarrassed to say that in my haste to get back to work (okay, it was actually because Ariel made us leave), I didn't ask her what exactly these were for. But I PROMISE I will find out and update next week because I know you're all as curious as I am!!!!!!!

P.S.: Get excited for a SUPER-SCIENTIFIC (seriously!) post tomorrow about the biochemistry behind SPORULATION! It's one of the most useful and important techniques that we use in our lab, but admit it, do you really know why putting yeast into media containing potassium acetate makes them enter meiosis (beyond "it starves them")? FIND OUT HERE TOMORROW!! (I was actually going to write this post tonight, but then I ended up spending more than an hour JUST ON THE RESEARCH. This is legit, folks!)

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