I’m just closing out my second week here at the
Jordan-Sciutto lab and it’s been very enjoyable. I came in on Tuesday later than usual because
I was working with Eddie, since Julie was still away and Kyle was shadowing in
another lab. It was a relatively slow
day but I got to learn about Eddie’s project which is more on the pharmacological
side of the lab. He’s working on a pathway
with PERK that may lead to neurodegeneration because of unfolded or misfolded
proteins. I did however get to watch him
plate neurons as well as treat a set of his older plates with Ritonavir and
Darunavir to then observe the effects of the drugs the next day.
When I got in the next day, I went straight to work with
Kyle. We started the next western and
during the down time for that, I was watching and working with Eddie. He was harvesting the cells we incubated the
day before. I watched him do a few and
he offered for me to scrape the cells and then pipette them. That was pretty cool in knowing that they
were the cells that were going to be used in a gel and then a western. Once all of the cells were harvested, we
centrifuged them to pellet the unnecessary cell debris. While that was going we went over to watch a
microscope demonstration. Dr.
Jordan-Sciutto was determining if she wanted to purchase this new microscope,
and we were all allowed to watch the demo.
It was awesome. Everything was automatic,
choosing the dyes that were shown and then overlaying them to view it all
together. Then it did something called Z
stacking with a potato sample, since it’s too thick to focus all at once, the
machine takes pictures of each of the levels and then stacks it so all of the
layers are in focus in one image. We popped
in and out of the demo to work on our experiment but for a couple minutes they
were analyzing a cross-section of a brain.
I went back to working with Kyle and during the second set of washes for the
western we went down to the dark room real quick to make sure the machine was
on and ready for when we needed it.
After finishing up the washes and gathering everything we needed to
develop the film, we headed down to the darkroom. This time I did all of it. I transferred the protein signals onto the
film and then placed it in the machine and we got some really good
results. Once we finished that, we got
to use the microscope to view previous samples Kyle and Julie had been working
with. We were working and listening to
some country music so that was very enjoyable.
To finish out the day we analyzed these new pictures we took with the
microscope and were playing around with Excel to help with the standard error
and then graphing the data.
Thursday Julie was back from her trip. For the first part of the day Julie and Kyle
were making a PowerPoint presentation for the lab meeting that was taking place
later that day. I sat in on that and it
was interesting to listen to them talk about the article. Then I went back to counting. This time I was using a different image to
count to neurites, which was more difficult than before because with this one
you have to adjust the settings to be able to even see the dendrites. But we ate lunch and talked which was very
nice. At 2, the three of us headed over
to the library so they could practice their presentation. The library was amazing. It was huge and had so many nice resources to
use and it’s somewhere I could spend my whole day. Since we had some time to kill before the lab
meeting, Julie took us to the Fine Arts Library to look around. That was incredible. The building itself was quite interesting and
then inside it was very elaborate. Finally
it was closing in on 3, so we started to walk over to the building where the
meeting was taking place and we stopped at a Wawa on the way to grab some
gum. When we got to the meeting room
there were some people from another lab there and they were all very friendly
and welcomed me to the journal meeting. It
ended up that there were a lot of new people in attendance. I was able to listen to Brigid, a grad
student working in my lab as well as another lab on campus, about her most
recent project which she’s hoping to get published soon. She talked about oligodendrocytes and
oxidative stress and its effects on the cells.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stay to listen to Julie and Kyle’s
presentation, but I’m sure they did great!
Friday was slower. We
continued with another western to test for synaptophysin. During the downtime, Julie showed both Kyle
and I how to analyze the film we developed.
Then the majority of the time I was counting more neurites. Once all the washes were done we went down to
the dark room once more to develop this most recent western. The rest of the day was spent counting the
neurites, which wasn’t the most exhilarating but it’s important. Then I got a call form Matt right as I was
finishing up counting and he asked if I wanted to come down and talk for a
little bit. We ended up walking down to
the Ben & Jerry’s down the street and just relaxed outside on a nice Friday
afternoon. It was a good close to my
second week.
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