After a few weeks of waiting and disappointments, we're finally on a
roll again. The last few weeks have been slow because we had a major
contamination problem... meaning the plates we use to grow our worms had other
bacteria and/or fungi growing in them. It took a while to pinpoint the source
but after making batches of fresh plates, flasks of fresh E. coli and after
taking extra precaution we finally have a stock of contamination free plates. However
that was only the beginning of what’s to come…
The practice lifespan I started during my first few weeks in the lab is
now coming to an end and the results show that the mutant worm is living much
longer than it should be. The gas-1 strain (mutant strain) is supposed to have
a median lifespan of about 8-10 days but my lifespan experiment shows that they
are living 18-20 days…almost as long as the wild type (normal strain). Though I
had begun prepping for my actual lifespan using drugs, my PI said that no
experiments could be conducted with an animal that has lost its main phenotype.
What she means is that the worm’s life span is a major phenotype that we use
for experimentation and if this phenotype is not apparent in the animal we’re
working with, then any experiments we do using this animal are worthless. All
of the experiments in the lab that have been working on has also been affected by this discovery. The mutant worm
could be living longer than usual for a few reasons. 1. A random beneficial
mutation may have occurred in one of the worms and then outlived the mutant
worms and reproduced (in a sense survival of the fittest)
2. A wild type worm may have somehow crawled onto the mutant worm plate
and then outlived the mutant worms (again survival of the fittest)
So long story short, my original drug lifespan has been put on hold
until we find a solution.
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