Category: Conferences

I really dislike PCR. There. I said it.

OK, maybe I don’t really dislike PCR, but I don’t like when experiments don’t work. I find it hard to acknowledge the fact that doing a PhD is 10% intelligence and 90% persistence..life is very different in industry; if it doesn’t work, you leave it, or try one other thing to make it work.

Academic research is very different.. it brings to mind the phrase “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”. However, I had made a monumentally ridiculous transcription error (see what I did there!). Having had the PCR master mix recipe in my book (written by my PI for me), I had somehow managed to re-write this but during the copying over from one page to another, make a mistake in the volume of MgCl2 to add.. It went from 30uL to 5uL although I have no idea how I could have possibly done this..

Anyway, long story short, four failed PCR runs later, I decided to double check the master mix total volume..which didn’t add up, so decided then to check my PIs master mix and found the potential problem. the only other problem is that I have now spent hundreds of pounds on new reagents that I might not have even needed in the first place!!! My fingers and toes are crossed for tomorrow when Lucy kindly runs a gel for me to confirm amplification..picture to follow!

On a brighter note, I was accepted for a poster presentation for the OMIG meeting at Gregynog on the 12-14 March (tomorrow!!). So, five drafts of my poster later, and I picked up my final copy, perfectly printed (as far as I could tell after a quick glance) in A1 for presentation on Thursday (picture to follow too!). The hire car will be with me about 9am, leave mid-day and pick up Kirsty on the way through to Gregynog..looking forward to getting there and having the two course dinner 😀 (simple things 🙂 )

I finally met my first year undergrad MEDIC students this week too – in four groups, I gave a presentation of my PhD project in brief, and what the students are going to be doing as part of their practical project that I proposed a few months back. They all seem really excited to be doing it which is great, although not many of them knew much about microbiology, or candidosis..they will learn pretty quickly though I’m sure!

DM

Monday morning came too quickly this week. Sat (what I hope to be) the last exam for he foreseeable future; Biomedical methods research techniques, and honestly..it was hard work! A lot about protein work, cell culture, bioinformatics but very little microbiology (one page of twelve total!) so not a particularly equal spread of questions over the course! Such a shame..but fingers crossed now until the results.

With the dreaded exam over, the rest of the week should really have been easy going – just get on with in vitro biofilm growth, confocal analysis on Wednesday, start again on Thurs and do adherence assays with more fluorescence analysis.. but no, this week had to be difficult!

Tuesday and wednesday came and went, the biofilms were analysed via confocal down at BioSci with Mark (who I hadn’t met previously..lovely guy, very helpful). Candida samples were great, worked well and got a few good images .. Streps however..grr! Managed somehow to get some kind of (what looks like Candida) contamination!, and there were some issues with the acrylic too, so couldn’t really get particularly great confocal images. On a good point though, biofilm thickness was about 25 microns again which is what I had hoped for (consistent with previous results, and some papers I have found since) :).

Thursday..what a pain, Cardiff Uni (dental school) have something called TESS..its a seminar series with invited speakers and internal speakers. now it hasn’t been running for quite some time, but this week was a visiting speaker looking at something completely outside of my research area, and of no real academic interest whatsoever to me personally (for others, it was very close to their projects so for them it was perfect!). But this seminar was compulsory for PhD students…compulsory! right in the middle of the day..when I should have been preparing to inoculate my acrylic..so that was scrapped for continuation today. Then today I realised that I said I would take Yuri to the confocal lab for his samples..so again, I couldn’t do an awful lot with my experiments! I did manage to get quite a few words written for my first year substantial report, but still..so glad this week is over and can hit the ground running Monday morning! Cannot wait!!!

DM

Oh, on another side note, I had an abstract accepted for a poster presentation at Gregynog in March 🙂 (didn’t get the oral presentation, but a poster is good none the less!!) So excited to give my FIRST poster presentation in this PhD, really looking forward to it 😀