Pelangi Petang Production

Story #1: The Sick Fath.

Greetings. Today, I got flu again that I skipped Immunology lecture this afternoon. I started to feel sick last night that I couldn’t sleep. My nose was running heavily (is this phrase correct?) that I hardly breath. I forced myself to sleep and I did it around 2.00 AM if I’m not mistaken.

When I woke up in the morning, my head felt so heavy but again, I forced myself to go the bathroom and then to class. I still can keep up until that afternoon, I couldn’t tell myself to go to the class anymore. So I sleep for 5 hours (gosh!). Consequently, I missed the trip to our inter-college handball match at KOSASS (just another college name, it’s too long) as a supporter to our players. I SMS-ed my housemate, Sya, which is also the manager and the player. I told her to win the game as we lost last night game to K14 (another college name), the defending champion.

Story #2: We Lost With Pride.

As I mentioned above, we lost the second game last night to K14, the defending champion. They were all like beasts you know, they were so rough and harsh towards our players. Asal player kitorang nak shoot je mesti diorang tolak. Damn it! Hey, this is handball game not the WWF game! Their target was our manager of course, Sya, she is one of our key players. She even told the referee off for being unfair. I salute her. Haha.
We lost 2-3 to the opponents. Their 3rd and winning goal came in when we were changing our player. So lame. But it’s okay. We played well and most importantly, we didn’t play dirty tricks like the opponents. We lost with pride. Here are some pictures I took during the game. Sorry for the unclear pictures. I took them with my phone camera. Hover for image description.

We have another game today and hopefully we will win that game to go through the next round. Good luck to all the players!

Story #3: An Assignment That Could Squint Your Eyes.

This story happened last night as well. Right after we came back from the handball match, my roomate and I were struggling to finish our assignment - to design a primer. Just in case you did not know what a primer is, in the most simple words, it is a short sequence of DNA. There are forward and reverse primers. Primer is used in DNA amplification. You want that small amount of DNA to become larger so that you can study the DNA. So we have to design the primer. Manually. Manually means by using calculation based on formula. Okay, this is easy.

The most difficult part is to find the 5′ and 3′ of the primer. The alphabets you seen up there is the bases of the DNA. There are basically four DNA bases which are the Guanine (G), Thymine (T), Adenine (A) and Cytosine (C). The sequence of the bases determine the proteins they will produce. We have to find the starting and the ending of the DNA. This is not all…

There are thousands of them! Each line marked with numbers to help us identify where the starting and ending bases are.

After we have found the starting and ending bases, we have to calculate the annealing temperature, the temperature at which the DNA will complement to the DNA template. It should be between around 50 - 65 degree Celsius.

Whenever the temperature exceeded the range, we have to cut off some of the bases so that the temperature falls between 50 - 65 degree Celsius. Not only that, we have to make sure that the forward and reverse primer to have the same annealing temperature.

For this assignment, we have to design 6 primers. 3 forward primers and 3 reverse primers. For the reverse primers, we have to translate the base sequences first before we can proceed. It’s quite tiring but quite fun. We managed to finish the assignment.

Oh, what a long story. I rarely write this long. I have to go now. It’s already 8.00 PM here and I should have my dinner now.

Tata.