Ice, Fire, and Fooling Around With E. coli

All of that passed in a week or so, luckily, and save for a few days with weak sparkly snow that melted as soon as it fell on the streets, the familiar old rains returned. The weather had more surprises up its sleeve, however. As soon as the exams finished, a fresh new experience greeted us – weeks on end of sunshine and no rain whatsoever. I got burned more than once, and a couple of times it was surely above 30°C in the sun. It is now the end of June, and sometimes it feels as if we were in Italy, rather than in the dreary city that Glasgow and many other English cities sometimes are. Granted, there was a rainstorm or two in between the long episodes sunshine, but they were rare occurrences indeed.

The blast of heat caught me towards the start of my summer internship in Brian Smith’s lab. I had but one week to enjoy the uncharacteristic warmth before I started working in an air-conditioned laboratory every day of the week for one and half a month. The lab experience I had always dreamed about and had so looked forward to passed much too quickly, but I think I will be slow on forgetting what I did there.

My rather ambitious project was, thinking back, almost impossible to finish, at least for the inexperienced second year student I was. It involved attempting to examine the chemical interaction between 2 proteins (CLF and EMF2) of a certain protein complex (PRC2) using NMR spectroscopy. This would be done by simply extracting plasmids (secondary circular DNA sequences found in many bacteria, in this case containing the genetic code for producing the said proteins) from previously modified ‘storage’ bacteria and inserting them back into different bacterial strains that could produce the encoded proteins in large quantities so that they could then be purified and put together to image their chemical interactions in solution.

Although the task itself seemed rather simple, my incompetence and Murphy’s Law rendered it at times very difficult indeed. On the very second day I stupidly managed to destroy my bacterial samples along with the plastic flasks containing the precious liquid instead of extracting DNA from them. One of the extraction steps involved centrifugation at first 5000, and then 13000 rpm. As I thought the present 3rd Year student experienced enough, I took his advice to leave the sample in the 30 ml thin-walled plastic universals that the bacteria grew in overnight instead of moving it into 1.5 ml Eppendorf tubes. Bad choice, needless to say; the universals survived 5000 rpm with no apparent harm done, so I proceeded to centrifuge them at the higher speed. I hadn’t even thought of how thin the plastic walls of the universals were, and to put the cherry on top I didn’t look at the temperature in the centrifuge. All this led to the time when, 5 minutes later, the smell of E. coli started wafting from the centrifuge. I warily stopped it and tried to unscrew the drum, which was of course frozen in place – I had screwed it on snugly to begin with, but the little moisture that was there made sure that the lid stuck firmly in place at zero degrees. After panicking for a few moments, I carefully unscrewed the drum from the centrifuge that surely cost as much as my accommodation for a year and then undid the lid by force thanks to the added torque. To my dismay, all that was left of my universals were a few stray splinters and intact lids.

 In the end I managed to get close (within a week or two) to attaining the former goal of my project, it unfortunately remained only half completed, however. The amount of skills I learned was quite high for 6 weeks, though, and I’m very grateful that my supervisor took me in. Next year I will try for another internship, and hopefully with better results this time.