It’s no Guinness, but last night, I set my personal record for the longest work day in lab at 17 hours. Between the PCR reactions, digestions, ligations, transformations, immunocytochemistry, westerns, co-immunoprecipitations, transfections, and neurite-outgrowth assays, I found only one break for lunch at noon and no dinner until 5am in the morning! Fortunately, having heard about this crazy schedule of mine, my mom and dad drove up from NYC this past weekend with loads of frozen home-cooked meals to stock up my freezer. I also took some time off to shop for some clothes and groceries to prepare me for the many late nights that now lie ahead.

It’s been another week of intense lab work, but I did manage to take a little break over the weekend with some pool and poker. On Friday night, I left work around 11pm and headed over to Jillian’s with Mike for several rounds of 8-ball. Slept in on Saturday, and spent the evening with friends for some take-out from Dok Bua while watching Rounders, followed by a night of intense 5-card Draw and Texas Hold’em. Fortune smiled upon me this time (actually, for the first time) and I came out on top … not by much, but enough for lunch money for the next several days.

Today marks the infamous day when the fate of my 4th-year med school friends, at least for the next several years, was determined. Yes folks, it’s Match Day 2004! The good news is that all my friends, including my roommate, matched into their top-choice program! Unfortunately, the very concept of residency for me still lies far in the distant future. Incidentally, my old high school friend Sara was also up here in Boston this evening, so we attended the HST Forum together, where we dined over some good food and fine company.

That’s what I learned from work this week. I was starting to get frustrated several days ago when my first round of subcloning yielded no positive colonies as shown by restriction digest. After consulting with another post-doc in my lab, he suspected a strange phenomenon known as BamHI star activity. Apparently, under certain conditions, this restriction enzyme can exhibit a relaxation of its specificity, leading to non-specific digestion of my product. The two lanes shown in the picture, believe it or not, were digested with the same enzymes! (If you had to know, it was NotI and BamHI) I just repeated it the second time using less enzyme and over a shorter time, and voila! behold my beautiful clone! Yes, it’s sad that the only thing I have to report is from work, but that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to all week.

Last night, Bob and I went out to see an advanced screening of Starsky and Hutch starring the dynamic duo of comedy Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson – a hilarious movie to brighten up my day following yet another depressing lab meeting. In other news, today marks my last day as a Pharmacology class TA. It’s always sad to leave ’cause I enjoy teaching a lot. The good news is that I’ll have much more time to focus on work now.