Sorry for the long delay and the lack of posting. It's been a crazy couple of weeks and I don't really know when it'll let up.
Long story short, I found out early last week that the modified experimental protocol that I'd been given had a tiny (but HUGELY significant) error in it and all of the work that I had done during the four weeks before was CRAP. If that wasn't depressing and lame enough, after working late every day for the rest of the week and coming in on a Saturday to finish everything up, I made a stupid mistake and forgot to freeze my purified protein and I ended up just leaving in on my lab bench at room temperature until I remembered on Sunday (early) morning in a fit of crazy "Oh my God what have I done I'm so stupid I can't believe I did that." I made it back to the lab Sunday morning only to have to start it all over again from scratch. I was resigned to my fate and I figured from here on out, I'll be more careful and things will start to go well. That brings me to Monday. I purified another protein and when I looked at my gel, there was NO PROTEIN. Don't know what happened. Don't know why. It just wasn't there. In desperation, I asked my supervisor because I couldn't explain what had gone wrong. It had worked every time I did it before, but apparently, according to him, things like this "just happen" and there's nothing we can do except start over. BLARGH!
So where does that leave me now? I'm nearly done re-doing everything and this afternoon, I'll find out if the last three days will have been in vain or not. I'd like to think that since so much has gone wrong in the last 7 or 8 days that nothing can go wrong today, but I'm not going to count my chickens before they're hatched. Knock on wood, fingers crossed, wish me luck, whatever. I just hope there's protein in my gel...
Ahh, science. How I love and loathe it.
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