My practice week in Life Science Center by Gabrielė S.

I was always interested in science, various experiments, newest technology and what’s more important – how we can use it to benefit the human kind.

Therefore, I decided not only to watch different videos or to read about the intellectual and practical activity of humans based on natural world through observation but also to be a temporary worker in a lab.

Thanks to the company “Sėkmės mokykla“ , which gave me a chance to make this desire of mine come true.

So, talking about my days in the lab, I could say that we were doing some interesting work, i.e. animal cells thawing from liquid nitrogen, amplifying DNA using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) thermo cycler, making microfluidic chips, which are used for obtaining emulsion, using electronic pipette for making a component mix of PCR, preparing the agorose gel, which is used for electrophoresis (a technique used to separate the DNA molecules by amount of nucleotides), purifying the desirable fragment of DNA from the agorose gel, watching the results after PCR on computer using UV light and a little bit more. 😯

In the picture on the left (a hand with a glove 😉 ) you can see a component mix with 6x DNA loading dye (blue color), which contains glycerol and it becomes easier to release the solution from an el. pipette. In addition to this, the blue color shows approximately where the DNA in the agarose‘s gel is at the time of electrophoresis.

There are two electrophoresis chambers in the picture with red-purple containers. This machine creates an electric field and the DNA molecule can move through the agarose gel. DNA molecule with more nucleotides is bigger, therefore, it moves slower.

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These are the results of electrophoresis. Into agorose gel we added ethidium bromide, which causes gel to glow in the UV light and we can see DNA fragments in the first, second and third column.

There is a microfluidic chip, which is supposed to be used for mixing very small amounts of liquids. Actually, it helps to form droplets, which contain hydrogel beads, cell. In this chip you can notice repetitive structure. In each structure there are two inlets (for oil and for reagents) and one collection outlet, which is used to collect emulsion.

It‘s a lab, in which I mostly spent my time during the practice week. The computer shows a lot of identical droplets received by using microfluidic chip. These droplets are zoomed in, using a microscope, which you can see in the photo as well.

I strongly recommend to all of you, who are interested in life science, not to stop achieving your goals but to be creative and always stay observing everything around you because there are always so many things to do, invent or develop in this area.

You know, probably, sometimes it isn‘t the easiest task to be a scientist, but, in my opinion, it really pays off. 😉