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A lot of laboratories in my institute, they all share one confocal, but we have one to ourselves, because that’s what we do every day, is imagining.
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We use confocal microscopy and two photon microscopy, which are very good machines. So we encode these tags onto proteins that already exist in their neurons, so that causes either the whole neuron to light up green, or specific proteins within the neuron to light up green or red, and that way we can take images with our very high-powered microscopes. There’s also M Cherry, which is a lighter red than tomato, as you can probably imagine. So what we do is we genetically encode green fluorescent protein, mostly, or–GFP or TD Tomato is what I’ve been using, because that’s red – Lisa loves that name. Q: Can you tell me a little bit more just about the general work that happens in that lab? That’s super interesting.Ī: Sure. And then because we’re a drosophila lab, a large part of my job is just keeping all of our fly stocks alive.Ī: So we have a bunch of different, we actually have about 2200 lines of flies – these are different, transgenic flies that have different mutations, and we keep them alive at all times so that we can always draw on them if we need to. So technically I’m number two to the PI, so I’m like her assistant and well, manager. And that kind of goes back and forth with helping them design their experiments, and making sure that they have the tools that they need and they’re using them effectively. Making sure that I keep tabs of how much of each thing we have so we don’t run out, and part of that is keeping up with all the members of the lab, and figuring out where they are in their product so I can predict what they’ll need in the future. Can you provide just a brief description of your primary job functions?Ī: So as lab manager, I’m in charge of– well, primarily I’m in charge of ordering materials, reagents, tools, and all of that. And how long has it been since you graduated from undergrad?Ī: Graduated from undergrad in 2013, so, yeah.