Worms, Bombs, and Everything in Between

My first day was a bit of a surprise.  After extensively studying and ultimately writing my review on the insulin-like growth factor 1 (IIS) pathway and its roles in aging in C.elegans (a nematode), I learned that the project which I would be undertaking had nothing to do with the pathway.  But I'm actually glad that Dr. Murphy pushed me in a different direction.  Before coming to the lab, I couldn't really decide which of the various components of the aging process, including reproductive aging, oxidative stress, and learning and memory, I wanted to focus on, so I simply said that I wanted to do something on general longevity regulation, which, in hindsight, was probably the least attractive of my options.  I was assigned to work with a grad student, Geneva, who focused specifically on learning and memory.  We came up with a project in which I would train wild type, egl-4 (which functions in the AWC neurons), and egl-4 crh-1 double mutant worms to develop an association between a specific odor and food, and then examine if such an association is still present after a certain amount of time.  Unlike the IIS pathway, which is so well documented, the pathway in which EGL-4 acts is not, so it'll be really cool to study something which isn't as well understood.  And since I'll be working for 9 weeks, I might get to make more double mutant strains to test.

So basically, the rest of that first day consisted of some basic training of techniques, i.e. how to bleach the worms to obtain the eggs (which sucks for the worms because their bodies get completely dissolved), seeding plates (putting bacteria on them); a 2 hr long lab meeting, during which I was hopelessly lost; and reading 2 articles.

Tuesday was weird, to say the least.  Geneva, who is six months pregnant, needed to get some sort of test from a doctor, so she wasn't coming in until 12.  I arrived at 8:30 as always, and got cracking on reading those last 2 articles I was supposed to.  Some time between 10 and 11, I overheard two people in the lab I was in (not the Murphy lab because Geneva's office is in another lab) mention a bomb threat.  I thought this was simply a drill, so I just sat at my desk and turned to Gunnar, a postdoc in Dr. Murphy's lab who, like Geneva, has his office outside the lab, asking what to do.  He wasn't sure either, but a lady told us all to get out, so we did.  It wasn't a chaotic scene, however.  There was no sense of panic among everyone, and once we got outside we saw a mass of people walking towards the parking lots.  Thank God Gunnar was there, because he was able to drive me home.  Otherwise I would've been wandering around like an idiot.

Wednesday wasn't too eventful.  I learned how to 'chunk' worms (cut out a piece of agar on a plate of worms and transfer it to another), but other than that, I didn't have much else to do in the lab, so I mainly sat in Geneva's office reading articles and learning more about C. elegans.  In the afternoon Geneva and I went to another building, because she needed, for her project, to use a biosorter (a very fancy, intricate machine) to separate her worms which fluoresced under UV light (due to expression of GFP) from those which did not.  There aren't too many low points when it comes to research, but this has to count as one of them.  We essentially sat there doing nothing for three hours just waiting for the machine to count the tens of thousands of worms she had in her samples. And by the time I left about three hours later, the process still wasn't over.

The next day I attended safety training and I learned how to pick up individual worms, by using an extremely thin 'spatula' to scoop the worms up while I observed them under the microscope (these things are only about 1 mm long).   At first I couldn't pick up a single one as I didn't want to puncture the agar on which the worms grew, but after a few minutes something just clicked and I was able to pick them up with ease.  The funny thing is, on Friday, after I picked up the worms, they wouldn't get off the spatula, so I tried to scrape them off, but when I did that I would get agar stuck onto the spatula, which made it even harder for the worm to get off. There were several instances in which, after approval from Geneva, and a bit of guilt, I stuck the spatula into a gas flame and burned the worm to a crisp. Yes, I feel terrible about doing this, but I really had no other choice.

The rest of Friday was spent preparing for my first STAM (short term associative memory training) on Monday with wild type worms.  I needed to bleach my worms (dissolve their bodies; keep the eggs to make sure all the worms I use are the same age), and seed my plates with E. coli.  I also set up a mating of an egl-4 hermaphrodite and a crh-1 male so that I get heterozygotes in the next generation, from which I can ultimately select double homozygous recessive mutants.

So far I've enjoyed my time in the Murphy Lab.  Next week will be busy, as I need to run three STAMs and  do the necessary preparation for each (bleach worms, seed plates, chunk plates), but I'm looking forward to it.  If there's one thing I'd say I don't like about the lab, it's that I have to work extensively with E. coli, and that stuff just smells terrible.