Buffering...
- Anushka Ring
- Dec 1, 2025
- 2 min read
If there’s one thing about me that you should know, it’s that I love taking photos and videos. From a young age, I’ve been giving tours around my house, recording videos on how to toast bread, attempting to do karaoke, putting on puppet shows, and taking hundreds and hundreds of selfies in the mirror. I like going back to photos to re-experience the moment whenever I’m feeling nostalgic.
Last week, I was feeling especially proud of myself in the lab. My mentor, Pedro, was very stressed out, cursing in Portuguese and pacing back and forth down the 12 foot long room. We were behind on our fish specimens and we needed to do two sessions’ worth of work in one session. It was then that I offered to take part of it and have him do the other part with one of my groupmates. After a little bit of persuasion, he agreed and I excitedly got my materials ready. Buffer? Check. Pippete? Check. Tray? Check. Tips? Check. Super awesome helmet that had no relevance whatsoever to our work? Check. The helmet was something I had found sitting on the counter in the lab, and although the DNA we were working with wasn’t hazardous, it made me feel a little bit cooler while working independently. Looking back on the video, it was not cool at all. Just sort of funny.
Anyway, I decided to take a time lapse of me adding a buffer to our extracted tissue. Buffer ATL breaks the cell membrane and starts to dissolve some of the proteins and excess material in the cell. It is one part of a methodic process of isolating DNA, and needs to be done with precision. If you watch the video, you’ll notice that around three quarters of the way through, I switch pipette tips and discard my old tip on the paper in front of my tray. Discarding tips is necessary when the tip touches the side of the tube holding the DNA. I had ten tubes and I had only touched the side of one of them! This was quite an accomplishment.
Pedro also makes an appearance towards the end of the video, and judging by the look on his face, he was definitely feeling less stressed about the progress of our work now that we had split up and I had gotten through a few steps by myself. I hope to take more videos documenting my lab work, but this was a fun start to mark the beginning of un-supervised work.
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