Today was the first day that I have ever worked in a real lab.  It was amazing.  It was just a small step in the direction my major will take me.  This semester I am going to be working with tissue cells.  The goal is to change the DNA of the cells to make them produce a specific protein and a resistance to a drug.  The drug resistance will allow us to kill all the cells that do not permanently produce the protein.  Later, I will grow colonies of cells that produce the protein.

Today was a lesson in splitting the cells so that the cell line will continue.  This has to be done every few day because the cells grow so fast and the medium will only support a specific number of cells before the medium becomes too acidic and the cells die.  The next step is to take about 100,000 cells out of the millions in the plate and place them in one plate with medium.  The next day a plasmid with the DNA needed for the protein and drug resistance will be introduced to the cell plate.  It is expected that only about 100 of the 100,000 cells will permanently take the DNA into their own.  The others will just discard the DNA as foreign.