Quickie: A long day's work and a Bday Celebration

I stayed at work today until 7. It was tiring and I'm not sure if I was able to accomplish what I set out to do, but I won't worry about it till get back into lab. I might drop by on Monday or Tuesday if needed, otherwise I get a short break :). I don't know why I was so worried about doing the experiment I did today since I did fine doing despite the fact most people weren't in the lab and I didn't come across any real difficulties, I guess I was just hyping it up in my head.

So what I did today was extract RNA. I got a little excited thinking of how to describe what it does. So DNA codes for most things that we need for life. Think of DNA as a library of many books, each containing a code for a certain protein in our body. Each protein has a different function in order to help us live, some proteins, like enzymes, help to break down our food that we eat. There are 3 main types of RNA. One, mRNA, is a little messenger that copies information from the library, the DNA, to a little factory, the ribosome made up of rRNA. At that factory many tRNA, like little workers, come and bring all the parts that need to make up each protein. By extracting the RNA from the cancer cells and analyzing them we can see what mRNA was used when the cell was alive. When we see what mRNA was used we can see what different kinds of proteins were made in the cancer cell, some of them are specifically made more in cancers. These kinds of proteins that are over expressed can lead to the problems of cancers. By treating the cells with drugs and seeing whether these 'bad' proteins are affected we can see how effective the drug is.

Had dinner at a Mexican place with my high school friends. It's getting late so I'll post more photos later, for now you get a photo of the yummy strawberry cheesecake we had. I was too hungry to take photos of dinner but since it was Mexican I guess you aren't missing out on too much. We went out for a few rounds of drinks as well, I'll share photos tomorrow.

[Edit] Added two photos. I don't have the picture of us at the stairs. The birthday girl is sitting in front of the cake, I wonder if you remember her from your Facebook stalks...I had a lot of girly sweet drinks because it was the girl's birthday so she got to pick the shots that we took. The only manly drink I had last night was a whiskey on the rocks. I think I drank a good amount last night, not too much to get me drunk but enough to keep me happy and up for the celebration after a day's work. The shots pictured had three layers, orange tequila, Kahlua and Baileys.