A Different Perspective

For my science research course I am taking this semester, one of our assignments was to shadow someone else doing a different type of experiment. I had a lot of choices, since no one else was doing physics or astronomy research like me. The course is mainly aimed at biology and chemistry majors. The person I shadowed was doing research about GMO (genetically modified) foods. Specifically, she was trying to find a way to determine whether or not a food was GMO or not.

Electrophoresis Gel

Finished Gel

The way she went about her research was very different from what I do. My project involved gathering images over the fall semester. I am now analyzing and gathering data from these images and putting the data into a spreadsheet and graphing it. Her project involved setting up an electrophoresis gel and putting DNA from different types of GMO and non-GMO foods as well as a "ladder" which would help her measure the length of a base pair. I had some experience with electrophoresis in high school, but it wasn't very in depth, so this was still pretty new for me. She told me she had been having some trouble getting it to work, so she had to try setting it up in different ways. She added some chemicals to create a gel to use and let it harden to a jello-y sort of substance. She then added all the DNA and the ladder. She ran an electric charge through it and let it sit for about half an hour, so I went back to my own research. When I came back, it was done, and it seemed to work better than previous gels she had done. The end result looked sort of like the picture to the right, but with a lot less lines. The column on the left is the ladder, which is used like a ruler to determine the length of the base pair of DNA. The shorter base pairs travel further and end up closer to the bottom. She was looking for which food had a longer base pair. She knew which ones were GMO so her goal was to make sure that the experiment was working before doing real tests.
The research she was doing was a lot more hands on than my research. For my research, my professor and I used machines for everything. We took pictures of a particular star with cameras built into the telescope, I used a computer program to calibrate (remove the static and noise) the images and to extract data, I put all the data into spreadsheet and graphed it with another computer program, and analyzed that. For her experiment, it seemed she had to set up a new gel every day if the previous one didn't work. She compared the lengths of base pairs to see whether or not a food was genetically modified. It seemed that there was a lot less numbers involved with her experiments. Another thing, my images were taken over one period of time and whether or not we got images depended on the whether. If we found out we got bad data, we'd have to wait until summer or fall for the star to come out again. If her experiment didn't work, she would just have to try things a different way tomorrow.
Overall, it was interesting to see how a different type of scientist performs research. My research was almost completely incomparable to hers. When her electrophoresis was done, she could know right away whether or not it worked and what it meant. My research takes much longer to get to that point, but it is still very enjoyable.