If you follow me on twitter (@alexwillie) you know I like to tweet about my work in the lab and the funny things that happen throughout the day. I don't post about lab everyday, but #LabChronicles appears fairly regularly in my tweets.
I've been working on a large project involving profiling the gene expression in 32 tissue samples from mice. It's a large-scale sequencing project that uses relatively new (2000s) techniques in a unbiased fashion to try and understand preterm cervical ripening (and subsequent preterm birth) in mice. Anywho, the point is, it's a pretty involved protocol (recipe, basically) to 'prep' the 'libraries' or take a mouse cervix, isolate the RNA, and package it in such a way to maximize the data we get in the most economical manner (via sequencing). I successfully prepped four libraries back in December and figured 8 libraries in June wouldn't be an issue. Oh how wrong was I! It's taken me 4+ weeks, and I finally made a small step in the right direction today-- I have library 'amplification' of a practice RNA (see the glowing white smear on the gel below). I think the past failures were a matter of 'crap in, crap out,' meaning we have some sort of non-ideal starting material that's giving us next to nothing at the end (I saw just the white rectangle below the smear. This bottom white rectangle is adapter garbage that's leftover from connecting adapters to the RNA).
Oh science. You are so frustrating but so rewarding! #LabChronicles
