It's a full life, and a pleasant one.

Update time! Quite a lot has happened since I last posted. First and foremost, I have officially joined a lab! It's the same lab I was in Fall quarter, meaning that I'm back working on worms. I am definitely happy to be here. It's nice to finally feel like I've got a home. I have my own bench space, my own desk. I even got a new computer(which I am using to write this blog post). It's a mac, which I'm not too thrilled about, but (a) if I had complained enough, I could've gotten a PC, (b) it's free, so I'm not going to complain, therefore (c) I've got a new mac. It's actually pretty sweet, and CERTAINLY better than what I had before. I also really like the people in this lab. I kinda forgot how much I liked it here first quarter, but now that I'm back, I totally remember.

The work itself is a little tedious and boring, but it definitely keeps me busy. We're currently in the middle of a genetic screen; for those of you not familiar with genetics, it basically means we're looking for new stuff. The way this works is that we use chemicals to induce mutations in the DNA of "teenage" worms, then let them reproduce. The babies will have defects, which is what we want. The difficult part is finding ones that are interesting; in this case, we're looking for mutations that cause defects when the worms are grown at a higher temperature, but don't have the same effect at lower temperatures. These are really rare. Not only that, but a lot of the ones we find are ones we already know about and aren't interested in. So pretty much this next year for me will be devoted to sifting through a haystack looking for needles.

One other perk of joining this lab was that I got to go to an international conference in Germany a few weeks ago. I'll do a separate blog post about it, but for now I'll just say that it was a really awesome trip.

So yeah, all in all, things are looking up for me. I am super glad it's summer time. I've got a lot more free time on my hands now; I might even start writing more (doubtful). Okay, break time's over... back to the worms!