325: Chapter 325 Ordinary People Who Want to Catch Up with Geniuses

Zhao Yang didn't have any particular reaction to his parents' promotions, only offering a few reminders during dinner.

"Dad, there's a lot of outdoor work for pipeline network maintenance in the winter. Don't go to the sites yourself so often; just let the young people do the running around."

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Zhao Yang picked up a piece of steamed pork with rice flour and put it in his bowl.

"I go less often now, maybe only two or three times a month. It's mostly lots of meetings and filling out forms; those are more exhausting than fixing water pipes."

Father Zhao took a small sip from his wine glass, his tone carrying a hint of complexity. Having worked at the grassroots level his whole life, being suddenly promoted to an office job made him feel quite out of place.

"You'll get used to it gradually! As a leader, you have to learn how to assign tasks to your subordinates; there's no need to do everything personally."

Zhao Yang said with a smile as he looked at Father Zhao.

Father Zhao waved his hand and didn't say much more.

"Mom, you too. Don't stay up too late doing the accounts at the end of the month. If something can be done the next day, do it then. If a task can be delegated to your subordinates, let them handle it. Don't overwork yourself."

After finishing his advice to his father, Zhao Yang turned to look at his mother and spoke.

Mother Zhao waved her hand, saying she knew what she was doing. She had recently been learning to use a computer for financial reports, and the old manual bookkeeping methods were gradually being replaced. She found it novel rather than tiring.

Zhao Yang stayed at home for three days. On the first day, he had hot pot with his parents. On the second day, he visited Wang Ming's house. Wang Ming's mother cooked a huge table of food and insisted on keeping Zhao Yang for dinner before letting him go.

On the third day, Zhao Yang had an afternoon flight. Mother Zhao stuffed two jars of her homemade pickled radishes and a bag of roasted peanuts into his backpack. Zhao Yang didn't refuse and packed it all in.

After returning to the villa, Zhao Yang changed into clean clothes and went straight down to the basement. Shin-chan had already organized the backlog of animal experiment data. The statistical curve for the twelfth week steadily maintained the trend of previous weeks, with no sign of the gap between the experimental and control groups narrowing.

Zhao Yang sat down and reopened the Biology paper he had halfway finished. Since the data and previous research were already available, he didn't need to reorganize experiment records from scratch or rerun any analyses; he just needed to organize the verified conclusions into an academic format. It only took four or five days to finish the paper.

He submitted it to Cell.

Judging by the current quality of the paper and the solid data, Cell should accept it.

The enhancement of antioxidant capacity by SOD2 mutants in mammalian models was a new discovery that had never been reported before. Coupled with over three months of accumulated animal experiment data, there were no issues with statistical significance. If Cell accepted it, the gap of over 20,000 experience points in Biology should be directly filled.

After submitting to the journal, Zhao Yang came out of the laboratory.

Two days ago, Gu Qing had asked him to have dinner tonight. She had chosen a private kitchen in a hutong, hidden in a very narrow alley in Dongsi. The storefront was so small it was almost unnoticeable, but the courtyard inside was quiet, with only four or five tables.

When Zhao Yang arrived, Gu Qing was already sitting by the window with a glass of warm water in front of her. She was looking down, flipping through an experiment logbook, her brow slightly furrowed as if she were pondering some data.

"How long have you been here?"

Zhao Yang pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down, asking Gu Qing with a smile.

Gu Qing looked up and spoke to Zhao Yang with a smile.

"I just arrived as well. I ran a batch of qPCRs in the lab this afternoon, and a few samples had rather high Ct values. I'm trying to figure out what the problem is."

As she spoke, Gu Qing closed the logbook and set it aside.

Zhao Yang took the menu and flipped through it. The restaurant mainly served Huaiyang cuisine, which was on the lighter side. He ordered two dishes, and Gu Qing added another.

While waiting for the food, the two of them casually chatted about some interesting things they had encountered recently.

As they talked, the conversation naturally shifted to Zhao Yang's recent research. Zhao Yang mentioned the paper he had just submitted and briefly described the enhancement of antioxidant capacity by SOD2 mutants in mammalian models.

He had originally just mentioned it in passing and hadn't planned to elaborate, but Gu Qing picked up the thread after hearing it.

"Was the directed evolution screening you used based on random mutation or site-directed mutation?"

Gu Qing asked Zhao Yang curiously.

"Random mutation plus positive screening. First, mutations were introduced in vitro using error-prone PCR, then the mutants with the highest survival rates were screened under oxidative stress conditions, and finally, we went back to map the genotypes to the phenotypes."

"Then how did you rule out genetic drift during the screening process? Random mutations introduce a lot of noise; if the selection pressure isn't strong enough, non-target mutations will also be carried along. Furthermore, in mammalian models, the enhancement of antioxidant capacity isn't always a matter of a single gene; it's often the result of multiple genes working in synergy. How did you determine that the mutant you screened out was the core variable?"

Zhao Yang was stunned for a moment after hearing this question.

The points Gu Qing raised were precisely the core logic he had spent the most space arguing in his paper. To rule out genetic drift, he had used multiple independent repeated screenings plus a strict control group design; to verify the synergistic effect of multiple genes, he had used single-gene knockout and overexpression functional rescue experiments. These analytical methods weren't something just any graduate student could come up with; they required a very solid foundation in experimental design and molecular Biology.

"When did you become so familiar with these analytical methods?"

Zhao Yang asked as he looked at Gu Qing curiously.

"I've been studying them. While you weren't at Yanlin University, besides my lab work, I'd look through literature whenever I had time. Last time you mentioned the active site conformation of SOD2, I went back and looked up several related structural Biology papers. Also, that Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis method you used before—I ran it once myself using our lab's transcriptome data. I managed to get it running, but I didn't tune the last few parameters well, so the resulting heatmap didn't look very good."

Gu Qing spoke calmly, as if she were just describing what experiments she had done today, without much emotion.

Zhao Yang looked at Gu Qing sitting across from him. When she said those things, her chopsticks were resting on the edge of her bowl, and her tone was as flat as if she were reporting experimental progress.

She never really emphasized how much effort she put in, nor did she feel that the effort itself was something that needed to be highlighted. Zhao Yang suddenly remembered the seriousness Gu Qing showed when discussing Arabidopsis protoplast transformation with him back when he was still an undergraduate at Yanlin University.

At that time, she wasn't very familiar with many analytical methods; whenever she encountered something she didn't understand, she would look through books and literature. More than two years later, she could already independently run Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis on transcriptome data.

For someone whose biological talent wasn't particularly outstanding to grasp molecular Biology, structural Biology, and bioinformatics to the point of keeping up with his train of thought in such a short time—Zhao Yang could guess the approximate amount of time spent behind the scenes without even asking.

Zhao Yang was somewhat moved. Although he had the support of the System, he still had a very clear understanding of his own level of genius.

Gu Qing really loved him; in order not to be left far behind by him, her level of effort had reached an extreme degree...

But seeing the nonchalance on her face, he didn't point it out. He simply pushed the freshly served sautéed shrimp towards her.

"That heatmap was probably just truncated based on the software's default parameters. When you go back, just change the upper and lower bounds of the color scale and manually widen the maximum value; that should do it."