By: Abby Maruska and Zoe Rivard
4 December 2020
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been trying to finish up our research project. Whether we were in lab making qPCRs and running agarose gels or at home working on our final poster, we were constantly busy with our project.
In the last week of lab, we were making and running quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction, qPCR, for our gene. qPCR is just like regular PCR; however, the amplicon is measured after every cycle. We have ran this protocol with our gene numerous times before unfortunately, none of the runs turned out because of our primer. For this last run, we did a standard curve with our gene as well as a Beta Actin standard curve. After analysis we could conclude that our gene’s primer has an unknown issue because the calculated efficiency was very close to three, when it was supposed to be 2.0. On a good note though, we knew that we were correctly conducting our protocol because the Beta Actin standard curve had an efficiency of 2.04.
While also preparing for our end-of-year research presentation. We have been working hard on a scientific poster that showcases our year’s work. Because of COVID-19 and safety guidelines, we had to give our presentation through zoom. This was a very different experience than we expected for our first poster presentation. But we made the most of it and had a great time sharing what we learned over the past three semesters.
After three educational semesters and living through one global pandemic, we are sad to say we are done with RISEbio. We have not only learned useful lab techniques but also much more valuable lessons, like trouble-shooting skills and patience. But most importantly we learned the real-way research goes. And that is not always as you planned. We will be taking what we learned in such a short time and applying them in our future projects.
