Lab Work!

I just got back from the lab that I am working in. For those of you who don't know about it, I'll fill you in. I'm currently working in a lab for some school credits (sadly no money). Working under Dr. Weidanz (I think it's a German name) we're infecting mice with a mouse version of malaria parasites and seeing how their immune systems respond to it. In order to see how the immune system responds we breed the mice to have certain deficiencies in some part of their immune systems and see how this has an effect on their ability to clear the malaria that we inject into them. My job is to take DNA from the mice that we breed and check to see what genes they have (ie. normal genes or the missing immune genes that we're breeding for). To do this I snip off the tip of the mouse tail and then use some enzymes to digest it into pure DNA. Then I take this DNA and run it through some stuff that gives me a picture like the one you see here. All the ones with bars are the mice that have the genes that we are looking for. We're gathering this data on the immune response to malaria so that one day a vaccine may be developed for it. So if there is a vaccine some day, I'm pretty much the one to thank. I think I smell Nobel Prize.