Plant Biology

You wipe the hood down with ethanol before you touch anything, you scrub the marker off the boxes the plants live in, you rinse the scalpel and forceps and leave them in the oven overnight. The next morning you do all of it again.

The whole summer came down to one piece of DNA the lab had built and one question, did it work. You trick a soil bacterium into carrying it into tobacco leaf cells, put the cells on a plate that kills anything without it, and wait.

The controls were two plates of plain tobacco with nothing done to them, one that should grow and one that should die. Without both, a plate of green tissue is just a plate of green tissue.

The new DNA worked.

I spent a summer growing tobacco to check whether one plasmid worked. It did, and I still did not believe it until the control plate agreed.

A petri dish of pSSK6A tobacco leaf sections on kanamycin with green tissue growing out of them, next to a handwritten index card — Green tissue growing out of a leaf section 22 days in.

Wild type tobacco leaf sections on carbenicillin only, green and growing — Wild type tobacco at 13 days. Carbenicillin only on the left, kanamycin added on the right.

Wild type tobacco leaf sections on kanamycin, pale and not growing — Wild type tobacco at 13 days. Carbenicillin only on the left, kanamycin added on the right.

Wild type tobacco tissue after GUS staining and destaining, pale yellow with no blue — After GUS staining and destaining. Wild type, then pCAMBIA2301, then pSSK6A.

pCAMBIA2301 tobacco tissue after GUS staining, stained blue — After GUS staining and destaining. Wild type, then pCAMBIA2301, then pSSK6A.

Personal

Nine people standing in front of a large red R sign at night, one peeking through the letter

Five people at a Korean barbecue table with hot pots and plates of food

Seven people in suits with name badges standing in a bright hall with balloons behind them

Four people waving from inside and on top of a red convertible prop in an arcade

Four people in suits standing in front of a poster board and a tall plant by a window

Four people slouched in armchairs in a lounge at night with a pool table behind them