Ping's lab

The lab Ping is working in has gone through quite a lot of changes this past year. People leaving, new people joining, stuff being moved around, new equipments, and bunch of other stuff.

Ping's most recent desk arrangementThe writing area is kinda tight now but Ping have been going to the library or going home whenever Ping has to do writing. Ping gets to see the sun set and rises everyday and the lovely view when it is snowing.

The desk at the end of the bench is Ping's original desk. It is now moved to this side of the lab to be the gassing station (which is an area where we exchange the type of gas in the headspace of a flask/bottle that we are using to grow our bacterial cultures. The glove bag will be an anaerobic glove bag for culturing bacteria from hyena paste. Unlike mammals, some bacteria can only grow or grow better when there is no oxygen - known as obligate or facultative anaerobic bacteria. To provide them with the right condition to grow, we grow them in a glove bag that has the oxygen gas in the headspace exchanged for nitrogen. Sometimes people use a mix of other gases such as hydrogen or carbon dioxide. We have also used helium gas in the lab before too - this is a fun one!!!
This area used to be our gel electrophoresis area. However, we have moved the gel station near the entrance of the lab (below) and this is now the bench of a postdoc who joined us just a few months ago.
The gel area is where we run gel electrophoresis to separate out DNA, to determine size of our DNA of interest, to determine the length of our DNA amplification reaction (polymerase chain reaction, PCR), and anything else that requires the visualization of DNA.
This are used to be Steph's bench and the lab computer for everyone's use. The computer is now moved to the end of the desk (can see the chair facing the wall? That's where the computer is. ) and the desk and bench is now used by a post-doc who joined us sometime middle of this year. She's been a really nice addition to the female population in the lab but Ping still misses having Steph around, especially during the nights and weekends.
Here are two more glove bags. The one closer is a new one we recently bought for isolating bacteria from the human gut (using colonoscopy samples) and the further one is for isolating bacteria from soil. These are in a smaller room somewhere across from the main lab.

Pretty cool, eh. Ping is lucky to be in a pretty complete lab, having most of the stuff that Ping needs or would like to explore with.