214: Chapter 214 As expected of you!

Zhao Yang took it and grasped the pestle. His high physique of 18 points granted him extremely powerful control over his hand muscles.

Following the frequency and force Gu Qing had used just now, he began grinding in the mortar. His movements were even and incredibly stable.

Watching Zhao Yang's perfectly standardized movements, a hint of amazement flashed in Gu Qing's eyes.

Although she had long expected Zhao Yang's genius, every time she saw it, Gu Qing couldn't help but sigh in admiration.

There really was a gap between people!

The two of them had joined the lab at the same time. Zhao Yang stayed for nearly half a year and achieved excellent results on the lab's previous project, even earning a co-first authorship on the paper.

Meanwhile, she was just a novice, and later Zhao Yang left the lab.

She had continued staying in the lab, finally making some progress on the new project and becoming much more familiar and proficient with biological experiments.

But to her surprise, when Zhao Yang re-entered the Biology lab halfway through, his movements were already more proficient than hers!

One had to know that this project was very different from the last one! And he had only just arrived!

Gu Qing felt a slight sense of frustration, but she quickly composed herself.

After watching Zhao Yang finish grinding, he immediately added the pre-cooled Trizol reagent, and the powder dissolved rapidly.

“Transfer it to a 1.5ml centrifuge tube. Next, add chloroform, shake vigorously for fifteen seconds, and then centrifuge at high speed at four degrees Celsius...”

As Gu Qing spoke, she used a pipette to draw chloroform, dripped it into the tube, and then handed the tube to Zhao Yang.

Zhao Yang took it and performed the shaking operation according to her instructions. Standing side by side at the lab bench, one handed over tubes and added reagents while the other performed physical shaking and centrifuge operations; they cooperated with great unspoken Chemistry.

Gu Qing took off her heavy anti-freeze gloves and stood to the side, watching Zhao Yang as he seriously checked the centrifuge's speed parameters. There was a hint of tenderness in her gaze.

“The algorithm model you mentioned in the meeting room earlier—can it really filter out tens of thousands of false positive genes?”

Gu Qing asked softly. She didn't understand the underlying mathematical algorithms, but she knew how complex biological gene networks were, and a few terabytes of data was an overwhelming amount.

“It can.”

Zhao Yang turned his head to look at her, his tone certain and without any hesitation.

“Mathematics doesn't lie. No matter how complex a biological organism's gene expression is, as long as it follows objective physical and chemical laws, it has a logic. As long as the logic is sound, false positive genes have nowhere to hide under a rigorous algorithm model.”

“That's good then.”

Gu Qing smiled, her eyes full of tenderness as she looked at Zhao Yang.

She liked Zhao Yang; she had always liked him.

But she had never tried liking someone before, and the Zhao Yang she had fallen for was such a genius, which made her feel inexplicably inferior deep down.

It shouldn't have been this way, as her family background was actually excellent, but Zhao Yang was simply too much of a genius, and his speed of ascent was far too fast.

It left her somewhat at a loss, not knowing how to like Zhao Yang or how to approach him. She could only channel these thoughts into the lab, wanting to be as close to him as possible.

She hadn't expected that Zhao Yang would actually return to the lab!

This made Gu Qing very happy—truly happy!

Watching Zhao Yang work seriously on the experiment, Gu Qing felt a sense of fulfillment, and her entire being visibly brightened with joy.

This is great! I hope days like this can continue!

It was past five in the afternoon.

Several terabytes of raw sequencing data were finally all copied onto a high-capacity enterprise-grade mobile hard drive.

Zhao Yang took off his white lab coat, hung it back on the rack, and put the heavy hard drive into his black shoulder bag.

“I'm heading back to the apartment to process the data first. For the next two days, I'll be writing algorithms and running data there. I'll come over to do the plasmid extraction experiments when I have time. In two days, I'll bring back the final dimensionality-reduced candidate results.”

Zhao Yang shouldered his bag and spoke to Gu Qing and two other seniors who were cleaning the lab bench.

“Alright, take care, God Zhao. We're waiting for your life-saving data.” The seniors waved with smiles.

Gu Qing also nodded, looking at him: “See you tomorrow.”

Zhao Yang walked out of the laboratory building.

Facing the evening glow, he walked along the tree-lined path toward the Young Teachers Apartments.

Upon returning to the apartment, Zhao Yang had no intention of resting.

He tossed his shoulder bag onto the sofa, took out the mobile hard drive, and plugged it directly into the front USB port of his high-spec desktop computer.

He pressed the power button.

The screen lit up, and Zhao Yang directly opened his familiar Linux low-level terminal.

For the next two days, Zhao Yang entered a high-intensity, non-stop work mode.

Processing data, writing code. During this time, whenever he had a free moment, he would go to the School of Life Sciences lab to conduct experiments with Gu Qing.

Once the two days were up.

Inside the apartment, the desktop's fan speed finally slowed down.

The massive several terabytes of sequencing data had been filtered through Zhao Yang's custom-tailored algorithm.

The original thirty-six thousand false positive differential genes had been ruthlessly slashed down to just seven.

These seven genes were the core Hub nodes with the highest connectivity in the rigorous mathematical topological structure, with extremely small P-values of significance under drought stress, and were definitely not sequencing noise.

The data processing was complete.

Zhao Yang copied the IDs and annotation sequences of these seven genes onto a USB drive and took it directly to the lab, handing it over to Professor Professor Gu Ming.

Seeing only a mere seven genes on the list, Professor Professor Gu Ming was so excited that he repeatedly patted Zhao Yang on the shoulder.

“Good, good, good! As expected of you! Several terabytes of data, and you really solved it in just two days!”

Professor Professor Gu Ming said excitedly.

“It was alright, not that much. I handled even more data for CATL before, and the algorithms were more complex.”

“The data in the lab is actually fine; I just had to set some special algorithms based on the specificities of our Biology major. That took a bit of effort, but it's nothing much.”

Zhao Yang smiled slightly.

“That's because it's you. For anyone else, with this much data, let alone two days, they probably wouldn't even know where to start!”

Professor Professor Gu Ming shook his head with a smile.

“Alright, enough said. We've clarified our future direction now and don't need to have headaches over that false data! Otherwise, if we had to screen them one by one, who knows how many years it would take!”

“Li Tao! You guys split into groups and start the experiments based on these sequences!”

“Got it, Professor!”

Li Tao nodded quickly.

The lab immediately entered the next phase. Two seniors took the sequences of these seven genes, quickly designed primers, and began large-scale qPCR (Real-time Quantitative PCR) validation with real samples.

In the time that followed, Zhao Yang's rhythm of life became fixed once again.

He would go to the lab every day to conduct experiments with Professor Gu Ming and Gu Qing, and engage in in-depth discussions about the experimental procedures. During this process, Zhao Yang's Biology experience grew rapidly.