Week 2
One third of the way through the program already...
The second week has been a lot like the first. I've done primarily Western Blots (4 this week), a pair of Protein Assays, and an ungodly amount of membrane work and film exposure. My work is now usually fairly independent, but I've always got help at hand if and when I need it. My pipetting has improved immensly, both in speed and accuracy (best correlation coefficient this week was a 0.996, when last week it was 0.973), and I'm finally starting to get the hang of being and working in a darkroom.
One new thing that I got to do was some Tissue Culture. TC involves any number of things done with some of the stock of tumor cells we keep incubating in the lab. This week, I split some cells in the biological cabinet, meaning that I took some cells from one plate, and put them onto several (4 each from 2 of them, in this case) others. Then, to test a hypothesis derived from one of my film exposures, I added varying concentrations of Apigenin to 4 of the plates (keeping one as a control), and waited to see the effect. It seemed to me that Apigenin was effective in killing off the tumor cells, though this may not mean that it is the way to cure cancer, for a variety of reasons.
The last thing I did was to check the [lysate] of the apigenin-treated cells (and control) by aspirating the media, adding PBS, centrifuging them, aspirating the PBS, lysing them, letting them centrifuge in the cold room, then removing and saving the supernatant while discarding the cells themselves.
Another fun week draws to a close. Next week, real work towards my hypothesis and presentation should begin.
The second week has been a lot like the first. I've done primarily Western Blots (4 this week), a pair of Protein Assays, and an ungodly amount of membrane work and film exposure. My work is now usually fairly independent, but I've always got help at hand if and when I need it. My pipetting has improved immensly, both in speed and accuracy (best correlation coefficient this week was a 0.996, when last week it was 0.973), and I'm finally starting to get the hang of being and working in a darkroom.
One new thing that I got to do was some Tissue Culture. TC involves any number of things done with some of the stock of tumor cells we keep incubating in the lab. This week, I split some cells in the biological cabinet, meaning that I took some cells from one plate, and put them onto several (4 each from 2 of them, in this case) others. Then, to test a hypothesis derived from one of my film exposures, I added varying concentrations of Apigenin to 4 of the plates (keeping one as a control), and waited to see the effect. It seemed to me that Apigenin was effective in killing off the tumor cells, though this may not mean that it is the way to cure cancer, for a variety of reasons.
The last thing I did was to check the [lysate] of the apigenin-treated cells (and control) by aspirating the media, adding PBS, centrifuging them, aspirating the PBS, lysing them, letting them centrifuge in the cold room, then removing and saving the supernatant while discarding the cells themselves.
Another fun week draws to a close. Next week, real work towards my hypothesis and presentation should begin.
posted by Brian at 6/24/2005 08:24:00 AM
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