Life's
Beginnings ....
Jenny
Zhang
It
started like any ordinary day in the lab.
Getting in at 9am. Some people were already here. I’ve been
trying hard to work out exactly when they get here - they
seem to never go home.
Oh, how rude of me, allow me to introduce myself. Jenny Zhang.
Not quite B.Sc (Hons). I’m in my Honours year, you see. The
big year where everything you have done in your undergraduate
career doesn’t count a bit.
My project is a part of the astrobiology research,
though the reasons for starting the project now seem so unclear
to me, and it seems that every day I’m in the lab, it becomes
more and more hazy.
I’m looking at a solute transporter in a
newly isolated microorganism. How does this relate to astrobiology
you ask? I often ask myself the same question.
This is how I justify it: Astrobiology is
a subject area with very varied research paths. If you really
want to group them, there are 3 main groups.
Firstly, looking at the universe- looking for extrasolar
planets that may be hospitable for life. Secondly,
looking at all the weird and wacky things on earth, microbes
that live in high salt, incredibly acidic conditions, high
temperatures, and all that jazz.
And lastly, the field I’m looking at, early life
on earth.
A brief history of time. Well, not really. It’s more a brief
history of life on earth. We don’t know exactly when it happened.
We don’t know exactly what happened.
All we know is that around 3.6 billion years ago, there are
microbial fossils. What are they of? Stromatolites. Mats of
cyanobacteria (blue green algae) which interlace
to form a column-like structure. We still have them here today.
A big colony of them can be found in Shark Bay in Western
Australia.
So why am I telling you all this? To get back to our original
point, I’m looking at a newly isolated microorganism
which was found in these living stromatolites. Understanding
it will allow us to understand a little more about how these
stromatolites have been able to survive and thrive in Shark
Bay. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
What I did on the 12th of April. I’m in the middle of an experiment
which runs a few days. It involves a lot of genetic
techniques (such as PCRs- polymerase
chain reactions). You see some of it on CSI, it’s used to
amplify genes, where you only have a small
sample to begin with. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as fast
as they show it in CSI. It takes about an hour to set it up,
and another 2 hours to run a ‘standard’ PCR. Oh how I wish
I had a real life remote control.
At midday, I’ve finally managed to put my reactions into the
machine which runs the PCR for you. I took a 2 hour break.
What else was I suppose to do at that stage?
At 2, I set up a gel. After the PCR, you run an agar gel,
to make sure that the products are actually there. The idea
behind gels (or electrophoresis
as it’s formally called) is that DNA is a negative molecule.
When an electric current is passed through the gel, a neutral
substance, the DNA will migrate from the negative terminal
to the positive, separating along the way according to the
length of the DNA fragments.
The gel takes about 40 minutes to complete, and another 10
minutes to visualise. By this, we put the gel into a bath
of ethidium bromide, a flourescent chemical. The molecule
of ethidium bromide slots in between base pairs of the DNA,
and flouresces when UV light is shined on it. You can see
bands on a gel when you look at it in the UV light which tells
you about how bit of a piece of DNA you have.
In between gels and PCRs, I was reading articles. No, not
ones from Cleo or Cosmopolitan. More journal
articles written by scientists. They allow us to keep
ahead of the field. There’s only so much we can do
in research, and science is a very diverse area. You have
to rely on other scientists to do work which compliments,
or even contradicts the research you are doing.
A typical day finishes at 5:30pm or 6. Longer days can finish
at 8. It just depends on what I’m doing.
To tell you the truth, I’m not liking it all as much as I
thought I would. I was always good at lab work, but honours,
it’s a different basket of fish altogether. I don’t mind the
solitary research, or the self learning. I can’t even pinpoint
what it is I don’t like. I just have a feeling that it’s,
perhaps, not for me after all.
I emailed my high school chemistry teacher after lab. We still
keep in touch. It’s quite nice really. She’s the one who really
pushed me into science, and I know I’m going to be forever
grateful, because I still love the field,
even though I don’t like honours all that much. But I’ll see
it through. I will be Jenny Zhang, B.Sc (Hons). Where I go
from there, well only time will tell.
I know that whatever I do in the future; it will be something
science related.
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