Blogs Contributed by State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota

The Mad Scientist and the Violet Clones

Blog

By: 
Kristine Cerbone

Kristine tells us about cloning African violets. The little plantlets are soooo cute!

Every time I think of a clone my immediate image is alien shaped pods with a ton of goo oozing out, and the mad scientist in the corner wearing a lab coat with a crazed look in their eye. And now, I know what it's like to be that mad scientist.

In the same class where I was taking care of NIH-3T3 cells, we did a cloning experiment on African Violets. This was the first experiment we did in the class, so it was... Read more

Mind Over Acrylamide

Blog

By: 
Kristine Cerbone

When I was first introduced to acrylamide gels way back in Fundamentals of Biology, I did not have the privilege of assembling the reagents. But I can remember just loading the gel was intimidating at first, trying to maneuver the fine tip between the plates and hopefully into the barely distinguishable wells of the gel. In the first technique class in SCF's Biotechnology program (nicknamed 'The DNA Class') I developed a false sense of security with gels. Because we mostly handle DNA, the gels that were made and ran in that class were aragrose gels. In my opinion, agarose gels... Read more

My Beginning in a Nutshell

Blog

By: 
Kristine Cerbone

Hello, my name is Kristine and I'm currently enrolled in State College of Florida's Biotechnology program. I have always been in love with science and remember watching documentaries and television shows wanting to work in the labs that the actors/featured scientist were in. I thought in order to get to work in such a place you needed to go to Harvard or some high class university first.

When I started my journey back to school I was working as a certified nursing assistant (CNA), and majoring in nursing. CNA's are the low man on the health care... Read more

Hurry Up and Wait

Blog

By: 
Kristine Cerbone

If it's one thing I've learned in my technique classes is that there is a lot of 'hurry up and wait' procedures. Working with proteins is definitely no exception.

For the past month or so my protein class has been working on purifying bacterial alkaline phosphatase (BAP). Rewinding back to day one of the process, we received our bacteria that had already been induced so our first step was to lyse the cells. Method used for lysing = sonication. I have to admit, this is my least favorite method for lysing cells. The sound of the sonicator... Read more

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