Jenny - Entry #4 at CHLA

Hello everyone, I'm back for my fourth blog post. This past week and a half was pretty ordinary. I've still been working on the imaging of the lungs, and it's taking much longer than I thought it would. The process is pretty tedious, as I'm basically sitting at my desk,staring at 283 slides of similar images on the computer for hours. I'm not complaining, though! I am super grateful that I am able to help out my lab so that they can use this for their grants in the future - and hey, someone has to do the work, right? My PI has been super busy writing her grant and going to conferences and I've pretty much been working alone.

Last Friday, though, I was pretty so close to finishing up my slides (only about 10 more out of 283) and then the worst possible thing happened - the program crashed. I thought that it wasn't a big deal because I had been saving so frequently, but unfortunately, when I opened up the file, nearly all my data from the week was gone. At first I was kind of in disbelief that basically all my work had been erased, and then I just got very annoyed. Not only did we never figure out why the program crashed, but I never retreived the data back. But no matter how upset I was, I reazlied that this is what research is about. Not everything works out the first time, and you have to keep trying and troubleshooting to get results. Since it was the end of the week, I was just told to go home and rest so that we could figure it out the next week.

Thankfully when I came back to the lab, the situation was looking a little better. Although my data would never be recovered, our imaging specialist came up with another method so that the process would go by much faster. Instead of me individually circling each cell, he manipulated the image so that nearly everything, even dimly stained parts, of the lung would be highlighted. All I had to do was erase the "fuzzy" spots, since a lot of the marks were not significant and would just be background noise in the final product. This method was much more efficient than before, and I was able to finish it in 3 days instead of a whole week! I just had to keep going at it, with Spotify by my side.

And as I mentioned before, I had been testing out a new protocol for clearing human lung tissue for antibody staining. A 15 week sample was mostly cleared so the goal by the end of the week was to mount it in primary antibody. Unfortunately, because my PI was not directly here with me and her assistant, we were unsure of exactly what antibody she wanted and there was a lot of confusion. Eventually, everything was figured out and I washed and blocked the sample, while the assistant mounted it in the primary antibody. Next week will be my last week at the lab, and even though I haven't even left yet, I know I'm going to miss everyone so much! I hope everyone's having a nice summer!