Unsuccessful

Today was just a bunch of screw ups :( During the final steps of purifying a plasmid from a bacteria, I applied to much force to the plunger and caused a lot of the eluate to quickly squirt out of the syringe (it is important to have the eluate drip out slowly so that the DNA plasmid would have a good amount of time to bind to the Nucleobond Finalizer). This probably caused me to lose a lot of my DNA and lowered my nucleic acid concentration :( In the end I only had 1733 ng/ul. The PI mentioned at lunch that the best they had was around 4000 ng/ul which means I have a loooong ways to go. *sigh*

One really awesome thing I have to mention is that the lab has this spectrophometer that requires only 1 ul (1 microlitre, it's like the speck of a raindrop when it's sprinkling) of sample to measure the absorbance, nucleic acid concentration, protein concentration, EVERYTHING. Dude! that is so awesome. I looked it up just now and it is called the nanodrop. I wish they had these in biolabs rather than using those freakin cuvettes (1 ml of fluid required). Things would be so much easier with everything calculated for you instantly!

Another problem with my technique today was loading the DNA sample into the agar gels after they have been digested with restriction enzymes. I didn't really know that I wasn't supposed to go into the wells while I was loading the wells so I did a little damage to the bottom of the well (but not enough to puncture the well entirely, thank goodness). I asked Sven what I should do so that I don't kill the gel, and he told me that I should leave my pipette above the well and just allow the sample to flow from the pipette tip into the well because glycerin is mixed into the sample and it is denser than the buffer, which would allow everything to just sink down. Hopefully I will do this correctly tomorrow and not screw up too badly.

Why am I repeating this experiment if I'm just checking to see if the correct plasmid was extracted? Well...the restriction enzyme (SmaI) didn't exactly work...or it was super inefficient. Apparently the plasmid was only cut once by the enzyme rather than twice (there are two restriction sites for SmaI in the particular plasmid I was using) because it was slow acting. *sigh* Oh wells, tomorrow I'm repeating experiment except I'll be using BamHI and EcoRI which are known to be fast acting :)

Anyways, let's stop on my sad rant. I'm going to try a döner now with my flatmate :)

[EDIT]

Finally tried a döner just now with Marion somewhere halfway from my flat to the main station. It seemed like quite a busy street with some bars here and there. The döner I tried is apparently a very standard and normal döner in Germany (apparently there are many different kinds such as sandwich style, on a plate with sides style and some other ones that I can't remember? döner in Turkish is just supposed to be the meat in the bread rather than the entire sandwich itself). It was pretty tasty, but I wouldn't say it's super awesome that I'd eat it everyday. I mean, this is still German fast food. It might be really unhealthy since Florian (PhD student #2) said the meat used in the döner is total "rubbish". He also totally dissed the döner before Sven told him that I was going to try one today, then he kinda fake complemented it :P (sorry for the super bad coloring of the photo, I think I didn't have enough light and I can't work magic with my camera -____-)

Marion also ordered me a Turkish Chai Tea but when the order came, she said it wasn't prepared the normal Turkish way. She didn't elaborate, so I don't know what she meant by that. It seemed like it was just a Turkish tea bag in a cup on a saucer. Maybe they also added some special stuff to it, but whoooo knows? I added a block of sugar so I can't really say how the tea tastes like alone but it tastes pretty good after that cube of sugar. :P

I feel a little fat right now :( My portions today felt way to big since it felt wrong to leave too much of my lunch since I left so much yesterday (like half) and it seemed wrong to not eat the entire döner. I'm too lazy to run though....gah! Such a dilemma!

I also want to mention that I tried typing on a German keyboard today....and man the slight differences make it so hard! First, I use the "y" key quite often and sadly, the "y" key and "z" key are switched on German keyboards, so I kept messing up. Florian and Sven just laughed at me -___-. The "Enter" key is also like..one extra key away (for three letters: Ü, Ö, Ä) and I can't...really reach it without moving my entire hand >.<. *sigh* It sucks that I can't get used to the German keyboard either since I will still use the US keyboard when I'm typing on my own keyboard like right now.

Oh yea, I described Sven to Marion when I showed her this blog. Like I said earlier, Sven is what I would call the "cool type". I feel like he can have the "I'm hot stuff" stuff attitude but he doesn't really show that around me. It's probably because he's more focused on translating his German thoughts into English when he speaks to me. He also has 5 piercings total (3 on one ear, 1 on the other, and a tongue piercing) and he drives a brand new BMW. I also showed Marion the lab photo that is from my "First Impressions" post, and she said that Sven is what she would call a "Proll" which is apparently a German equivalent for "chav" (UK version). But I always thought that chavs were more loserish...at least that's what Denise and Marcel made it sound like when I was in HK. I feel that Sven doesn't carry himself in a loserish way though. WHAT IS A CHAV?!?! I'M CONFUSED!!!

And I feel I should mention that even though I describe Sven as the "cool guy type," he's really nice, sweet and sometimes comes off as shy and quiet. He's very noncritical on the things I do, and reassures me whenever he thinks I'm worried about future encounters with another professor or difficult experiments. He's overall chill and is probably the typical German nice (as in just like Marion! but in guy form) :) I don't want to create a bad impression of him because he's totally awesome!