Lab Update

Working in a lab can be summed up in one word: patience (no, not patients; that's working in the hospital).  Most of the time is spent planning and preparing for the crucial data-producing step of an experiment.  Of course, this crucial step (which involves a lot of waiting while the experiment runs) usually does not work the way you thought it would, so it's back to planning again.  The hope is that eventually you find the right parameters and conditions, produce good data, and maybe even learn something new!

My project, which should have started around the beginning of the month, had to be pushed back because the company we order the supplies from lost our order.  We reordered and the materials got here on Monday!  So I am moving forward.  However, last week while I was waiting I got to become very good friends with this guy:

This is our new Nikon microscope!  It can do both bright field and fluorescence imaging, and it is very, very nice.  I've been using it to measure the lengths of intestinal villi (the little fingers that stick out into the intestine to absorb nutrients) on slides from mice that Dr. McElroy used in past experiments.  The goal is that I measure about 100 villi per slide on 50 or more slides, so I have been seeing A LOT of this:

We are comparing villi lengths between mice treated with two different substances.  It is not very interesting, but it needs to be done.  But now that my materials are here I can put villi measuring on hold and start looking at variation in stem cell gene expression in mice that we induced to develop NEC!

  

Here I am in the process of extracting RNA

Tomorrow is a big day in lab because we are going to induce NEC in 10 mice pups, and then after several hours we will harvest the small intestine and preserve it.  We use the tissue to make slides and extract protein and RNA for our various experiments.

Matt prepares small intestine samples

 This is our -80 C freezer where we store tissue samples, RNA, cDNA, etc.  Every time I open it I feel like I am opening some kind of crazy time machine because so much steam billows out!