Tomorrow we begin calling corn genes and finish up annotating phage genes. It’s weird to think that we only have 3 more classes left in Bio Lab, and will be finishing up a year long project. Only 5 more school days left too. I hope everyone has a good Easter Break.
I am starting to get worried about the upcoming test as I am sure most everyone is. I’m also curious to see how the gene blasting will work with corn, and am excited to learn about something eukaryotic, and for that matter, something that is actually a living organism unlike phages haha. I am getting close to finished with my functional annotations too, so that will be nice to be done with finally. I hope everyone does well on the test tomorrow and good luck studying!
I can’t wait to present tomorrow, although I’m not sure how many people will be there. Both of the posters that were picked did a great job, and I think any of the posters presented today could have also been successful at the symposium, so it must have been a tough choice. I’m also glad I won’t have to pick which person to go present over the summer, as I think everyone in the class could do it very well and represent Baylor and our class very positively. It was hard enough picking the top 3.
The poster presentations should be fun, and I am looking forward to seeing what everybody has done with their projects. It takes a lot of work to make a scientific poster, so the finished products should be nice. Even if our groups poster does not get picked, at least we will have a giant poster to hang in our rooms to show for it.
Today went by a little bit faster, although it still was very tedious. Most of my genes don’t match a protein directly, so that has helped some, although because of this sometimes its hard to find conserved domains and the ontology tree stuff. Hopefully the next time will go by even faster.
Last lab was interesting, albeit a bit frustrating. It will be neat to see what the genes actually do, and where else they are found. Next lab should go a lot faster too since I am done with the virtual box now.
We’re finally to the point where we can start finding out what the specific genes for Benedict do. Now we will actually be contributing to humanity’s sum total of knowledge about phages! One giant leap for our class, one small step for mankind! But hopefully our work will be helpful to others looking to find a cure for TB eventually. I’m looking forward to maybe being able to do some wet lab work again.
Today we presented over the group annotations, and so hopefully we will soon move on to finding out the genes’ specific functions. I am excited to see how many novel genes we really have, and if we will be able to figure out the function of a protein that had been unknown beforehand.
Our group finished our work on our section of the genome this past thursday, and we only had one gene disagreement, so hopefully its because our section was pretty easy, not because of any miscallings. Jesus also found out where our section of the genome is in relation to the stereotypical Cluster A, and we were in the section with a lot of ‘other’ genes for purpose, which would explain why we weren’t able to find many blast matches.
I have most of my genes annotated, but next time I am going to run through all of them and make sure I have everything on the checklist. I’m excited to get through all of the annotating so we can start to find out what these genes do, and if Benedict has any cool new proteins.