thesis

So I've got a thesis topic for my undergrad thesis. And a thesis meeting early tomorrow morning with my two advisors. I'm pretty psyched about it. I'm going to be co-advised by one of my favorite profs at Reed and someone who works in the area of natural product biosynthesis at Portland State University.

The project is going to be to clone and express two enzymes responsible for an interesting transformation in an antibiotic biosynthetic pathway. If I manage to get them pure I'm going to assay them with the appropriate analogs of the natural product and attempt to characterize them. One of them is interesting because it shows no sequence homology to the class of enzymes you would expect it to be in. It's required for the biosynthesis in knockout studies at the genetic level, though so it will be interesting to see what the deal is there (if I get that far).

So basically messing around with cloning and expression for nine months. Protein biochemistry is my one big gap right now in my lab training. I've got basic molecular DNA & RNA techniques down, I've done some cell bio stuff like ELISAs and Westerns and histology and various biochemical assays and shit, and I know how to do synthetic organic chemistry. But I haven't worked with cloning and expression and protein purification and all that stuff that makes you a real biochemist.

I hear protein work is boring as shit and frustrating as hell. But running silica columns is also boring as shit and can be frustrating as hell. So I guess I will finally have a true opinion of which is more boring: cloning or silica columns. And I can tell my chemist and biologist friends to STFU because I know all of boring, thank you very much, in all of its flavors.

Anyway, my general philosophy on this matter is that all fields of science has its boring and you just choose your boring and go with it. I can get through boring--the project just needs to be interesting. To quote the aforementioned Reed professor "Experiments suck. Until they don't."