To the Victor Goes the Soy Latte

At long last, my targeting vector is finished!

(Well, okay, it's finished pending results of sequencing, but still, it looks good so far!!)

You may be asking yourself, "Waterlily," -- you call yourself that sometimes -- you say, "Waterlily, just what is a targeting vector, and why should I care?

In a nutshell, a targeting vector is a large piece of DNA used to alter the genome of a mouse embryo through a process called homologous recombination. You can peruse this listing in Wikipedia for more information.

Once I saw the results of my restriction enzyme analysis I decided that a victory soy latte was in order! Thus, on my way to drop off my precious DNA at the sequencing core I stopped by the coffee shop at the UC Divinity School and grabbed a $1.25 soy latte (their happy hour special -- reduced price lattes!)

Seeing as I wanted to have this construct finished at the latest by the end of June, I'm both overjoyed finally to have it and disappointed that it took so long. However, seeing as it took me only four months to make my targeting vector using recombineering, and more traditional methods can take a year or more, I think I'm still ahead of the game!

The hard work of screening ES cells is yet to come, but I'm just glad I've (almost) finally gotten to this point!