New and improved Lab Break Room!

As promised, I am posting a few pictures of our newly renovated lab break room.  I mentioned in an earlier post that during Thanksgiving 2011, we took down a wall that divided the front room from the back room.  The front room used to be our lab breakroom and the back one belonged to my former lab, Dr. R's lab.  During my fourth year as a graduate student in Dr. R's lab, we moved down the hall to a bigger lab space and his breakroom (the back room) has been left vacant.  Well, with permission from Dr. Y, we opened up the space and now it is one big room.  The back room was then painted blue and the exposed pipes and borders in white.  The back room has a sink and lots of cabinets for storage so it was perfect as a kitchen.  We acquired some furniture from a former lab member when I found out she was moving back to her home country.  We now have her beautiful white leather couch.

With the backroom serving as a kitchen, J and I slowly equipped it with kitchen tools so we can make delicious lunches and sometime dinners in lab.  We have a  George Foreman grill that we regularly use to make a variety of panini.  Dr. Y was kind enough to bring in a tabletop oven and we used it periodically to make our pecan crusted chicken salads and even tandoori chicken.  Today we had prepared fresh "lab-made" pizzas for lunch.  Being able to prepare fresh food in the lab sure does elevated my experience in Dr. Y's lab.  J and I often spend time in this room discussing how to troubleshoot experiments over lunch or while we prepared food there.  One could say that we "cooked away our frustrations" away in this new lab kitchen.

View from the hallway.

Fridge and Sink.

Painted dry eraser board with magnetic border.

The painting is a courtesy of our janitor, Hector.

Cell culture contamination continued!

After my cell cultures got contaminated, other people in the lab took notice and began to suspect their own cultures. Last Thursday we cleaned out our cell culture incubator by wiping it with all the decontamination solutions we have in lab, autoclaving all of the shelves and the water tray in the incubator and then placed these under UV light overnight. Hopefully the extreme measures we took will remove these little creatures that's been haunting my mental well-being now.

Cell culture contamination.

Over the weekend my transfections were contaminated (likely bacteria) -- there was a white dusty coat/film growing above the cells.  I suspected that the OptiMEM (reagent use for transfection) is the culprit.  But then it happened again with new OptiMEM!  At the same time, Dr. Y used the same DNA preparation that I made recently for his transfection and his transfections were contaminated too.  How likely does a new preparation of midi-prep get contaminated?  Anyway, the problem was solved by filtering the DNA through a 0.2 uM filter.

After these cell culture contamination episodes, my paranoia kicked in and I began to suspect that all my cell cultures have some level of bacteria growing in them.   After careful examination the different cell lines I have been maintaining, I found these microscopic specks floating in Brownian motion around the cells.  I consulted with Dr. Y and he said that a few years back he saw the same thing so he took his contaminated cell culture samples to the pathology lab.  It turned out that they were Aspergillus!  According to Dr. Y, treatment with gentamicin will take care of this, but after reading these online blogs about Aspergillus contaminations, sounds like it is more serious than what he made out to be.  I am now geared up to do some serious decontamination of our cell culture room now.  More updates later.

Getting Real!

Initially when I started this blog, my intention was to produce insightful and polish messages/posts on here.  I also wanted to keep as much of my personal life from this blog fearing that someday when I am looking for a "real" job -- meaning not another postdoc position -- I won't suffer consequences of sharing too much on this blog.  But, I realized that the whole point of blogging is to connect with other bloggers who share the same interests and without putting myself out there, the purpose of blogging is compromised.  As far as putting the most "polished" work on this blog, well at this point, I have no audience -- so it doesn't make sense contemplating over the wording of each sentence for hours like I normally do with my other work?  Finally, while I'd like to wait until these surges of busy events in my life subsided before I update my blog, I find that when I do have time, these raw emotions that I felt at the time also has escaped me and I can't find the right words to describe them anymore.  Beside isn't the point of blogging to capture in time the rawness of emotions?  It certainly will give each post a genuine feeling of being "real."  So in an attempt to be as "real" and personal as I can, I would like to re-introduce myself.

My name is Uyen and I am currently a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  I graduated with a PhD from the Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology Program in May of 2011.  I took about two months off right after my graduation to travel for a bit and spend some time with my family before taking a position as a postdoctoral associate in the lab next door to my PhD lab, in the laboratory of Dr. Y.  Over the course of eight months since I joined, the lab has changed quite a bit.  We had eight people in the lab when I joined to now only four individuals:  Dr. Y, myself and two graduate students (J. and T.).  My first eight months as a postdoc has been quite productive.  I had applied for my first postdoctoral fellowship from the PhRMa Foundation and to my surprised received it!  Over Thanksgiving break, with permission, we expanded and renovated our lab break room and painted it blue (more about our blue break room with pictures to come).  Finally, I have been involved with a small group of postdocs here at UW-Madison to bring a postdoctoral association to our Medical School.  To my surprise, with over 800 postdocs UW-Madison does not have an organized Postdoctoral Association or Office.  Our effort has made some small progress but I am extremely excited because I think this is a worthwhile cause.

Well, I have exhausted my thoughts for today.  Another post to come as I am rushing to finish this Bachelorrette Party planning for my best friend.  I'm leaving on Friday to meet up with a bunch of girls in Dallas for a combined bachelorette party for H. (my best friend) and H. (a friend).

Keep current with the literature.

Did I say I was going to update my "daily activities in lab here on this blog?" I have to say I had underestimated the extreme fast-paced of my new lab; right now, if I'm lucky I might be able to post one entry per month.

Actually being busy is an understatement, since I spend around 10 - 12 hours in lab six days a week.  The crazy hours stemmed from my ambition to pursue two completely separate projects: one involves the testing of a new small molecule for organ preservation and the other, an exploratory project to develop a new drug screening tool.  Because both of these projects are in their embryonic stage, my first few months in the lab are spent at setting up new methodologies.  As tiring as it has been, I am excited about the opportunity to learn new techniques, which a postdoctoral training period is designed to accomplish.

I have always enjoyed bench work because being busy make me feels productive.  However, it leaves little time to read two articles per day -- a goal I had since starting graduate school.  Even now, with five years of grad school and five months of postdoc behind me, I still find it difficult to keep up with my literature.

But I do have some suggestions on how to read journal articles for the new graduate students.  While these are not comprehensive, I find these quite useful.

1.  Read journal articles in the morning before starting your experiments because once you've started your bench work, you won't be able to focus on reading.
2.  Don't get bogged down by the methodologies unless you're planning to use the technique for your own research; try to understand the key findings from each article.
3.  If an article does not seem too interesting to you, don't force it and move on to another one.  The last time I checked, there are over 20,000 articles in my field so there are plenty to read.
4.  Every once in a while, re-read key articles from your field, you'll discover that you have missed some important details the first time you read the article.
5.  If you have a feeling that an article will most likely be cited in your own research, add it to your Endnote or Refwork library.  I find it frustrating when I need to cite an article and cannot find it on Pubmed.

I'd love to have others share their thoughts/techniques on how to keep up with literature reading.

Introduction

So, I have decided to join the legion of postdocs who blog.  A formal introduction about myself, I am a brand new PhD from a major research institution out here in the Midwest.  I just started a postdoc position three weeks ago in a lab next door to my PhD lab -- a discussion of whether this is a good idea or not will be the topic of my future posts.  Anyway, the main reason I've decided to chronicle my daily activities on this blog is to share with the public the ups and downs and failures and triumphs of life as a female postdoc.  So my journey into the blogging world begins here...