Back to the bench...

Well, not quite yet, but very soon.  The CIHR proposal is in excellent shape - we're doing a final read through and then final revisions (just polishing) on Monday, and then I'll click 'Submit' two days ahead of the deadline (a new record).

It's in such good shape that I'm already preparing to get back in the lab.  The first step is updating the Table of Contents of my lab notebook.  This is just a Word file that lists each experiment's number and date with a few words or sentences describing it.  Having it is very useful as I can search for any word to find the relevant experiments (which I might otherwise have forgotten about).  The process of updating it is also very useful, as I have to read through my notebook and summarize each experiment.  That's what I've been doing, for the work I've done since January.

This readthrough showed that I have two projects ongoing.  One is the optical tweezers work.  Now that the system is working reasonably well, it's time to make some well-characterized DNA-coated beads (measuring the amount of DNA on each bead) and start trying to get cells to grab onto the DNA.  It would be good to demonstrate this at the bench as well as trying to see it with the tweezers apparatus (abbreviated 'OT' by its creator).

The other project is the purine work on the regulation of competence.  We now have the mutants we need, properly verified by PCR, so it's time to do some more rigorous phenotyping.