I am a graduate student in Lewis’ lab. My major job here is to isolate persisters. Persisters are bacteria that survive antibiotics, forming a tiny fraction (less than 1% in general) of the population. They are genetically identical to normal bacterial cells, but just transiently in dormancy. They resuscitate upon the removal of antibiotics or being put into fresh media. This presents challenges not only to the treatment of many infectious diseases but the capture of bacteria persisters. My goal is to isolate persisters without introducing any extra stress to the whole population, so that we can analyze the transcription and expression profiles as well as the metabolome of persisters to figure out the mechanism of their formation. Two years of experience on this project proved that this is a challenging yet exciting job. Right now, my feeling is that persisters remain on the tips of my fingers, but still out from my grasp---this will not last long.