What comes to your mind when you hear about the word ‘lab’? Maybe chemicals, smell, instruments, lab coats, scientists, fumes, fun or experiments, etc?:p Here, I will spill the secrets of the lab!
It’s genetic, it’s in genes, etc.! These phrases are so used regularly. We visualize the gene on an Agarose gel using ethidium bromide dye under UV light in the lab. Utilizing a set of molecular biology experiments, the recombinant gene of interest is cloned in the host organism.Proteins are ubiquitous terms to hear in our daily lives! This is what the proteins look like, as the blue bands after their Coomassie staining, Proteins are loaded on a gel called SDS-PAGE (sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis) to examine their quality, quantity, and identity. Sometimes, difficult proteins give you a hard time! Nevertheless, it was fun to express the sentiments of a researcher dealing with the difficult protein, which you can read here https://biocuriosity.org/scipoetry/#difficult-proteinI hadn’t heard of protein crystals until I started working in the Protein Crystallography Lab. Crystals can be visualized under a microscope and form various shapes and sizes. Here, you can see a beautiful diamond-shaped crystal:) For a crystallographer, the protein crystal is a gem, which, if diffracts well, has a wealth of information to solve the protein’s three-dimensional structure. Isn’t it exciting? However, the nerve-wracking part is obtaining the good-quality crystal that combines science, art, and luck! You can read here https://biocuriosity.org/scipoetry/#restless-protein to get some feel about the feelings of a crystallographer!
Hexagon-shaped protein crystalsProtein crystallographers love protein structures the most! A generous gift from us to our PI. Designed in a way that paper sheet can be easily updated with a new one having many more structures in the coming years:)
