What It's Like to Work in a Microbiology Laboratory?

            

              Ever Wonder What It's Like to be in a Laboratory?

As of Monday last week, I finally started my research in the laboratory. I have observed how the grad students at the ASU Biodesign Institute extract the necessary antibody proteins from the Nicotiana benthamiana plants and it is a very simple process. Simple laboratory techniques such as centrifugation, and filtration are used to breakdown the targeted protein from all of the biota, the potato X virus and the lab plants.

The first step I worked on in the laboratory was placing the fully grown plants in a blender in order to mash up all of the plant material into a droopy, green liquid paste substance. The reason why the grad students did this step was to acquire the necessary protein that has been stored in the plant material, which would be used to synthesize the antibodies. After all of the green "paste" is mashed up in the blender, it was neat to see that a simple everyday process called filtration is used. Simply the grad students just grabbed some filter sheets and placed the sheets onto four plastic, homogenous bottles. Filtering out the plant material was a very straightforward process in my opinion. The process is actually quite similar to filtering out coffee, when someone wants to have some tasty coffee in the morning. After all of the pure plant material is filtered and placed into four capped bottles, the grad students simply placed all four bottles into a plastic box and inserted ice to cover the sides of the bottles. It's pretty much the same when you place ice in a cooler in order to cool your refreshments. This step is the most essential one in the overall task, because like any protein there is an optimal temperature to which the protein needs to be in, so that the protein doesn't denature or break down in terms of structure. After 5-10 min the grad students grabbed the bottles out of the ice box and placed them in the centrifuge machine. The centrifuge machine we used was enormous. It looked almost like the size of a dryer! We set the four bottles inside the centrifuge machine and set the rotation rate of the machine to 1400 rev\min so that the protein found in the plant "paste" is layered and separated from the rest of the plant biomaterial. Thanks to all of these techniques I was able to observe how any plant protein can be separated from the plant residue, which allows me to further appreciate plants more.