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.

My first week

Well, the first week of the CERTL Program is drawing to a close. Given that it was the first week, a lot of my time was spent going over the basics under close supervision (not that I'm complaining, I don't really trust myself with most of this equipment)

But, that's not to say that I didn't accomplish anything. Dr. Kridel has spent lots of time right there with me, making sure that I can handle anything, and making sure that I understand what's going on, not just how to do it. Joy (who was gone until thursday) and Frances are both great at explaining things when I'm lost or confused, which happens to be a lot of the time.

With their help, I've learned how to do Protein Assays, in which we serially dilute proteins, then essentially dye them, and measure the color with a computer program and machine to determine their concentration. I've done a pair of Western Blots, which involve mixing and puring gels, adding protein samples, and then seperating the proteins by molecular weight inside of the gels. Gel Electrophoresis, another step in the Western Blotting process, involves the transfer of the protein samples from this gel to a sensitive membrane. I've done a lot of membrane work, involving washing the membranes, adding antibodies (primary and secondary), more washing, mixing solutions, adding chemilluminecene, blotting, and exposing and developing film.

My only complaint is that it's a lot of hurry-up and waiting. However, cleaning, reading papers and books to get background information on our work, and filling in my lab book keep me busy.

All in all, I'm really looking forward to the next few weeks. I really feel that I lucked out, both by getting into the program, and getting assigned to the Kridel lab.

CERTL Program

Well, I made it into the CERTL Program, as you could probably guess from the title. It's a 6-week research program with Wake Forest University and Baptist Medical Center. This summer, it runs from June 13th to July 22nd.

My faculty mentor in the Program is Steven Kridel, PhD., a member of the cancer biology department. He, along with his lab-tech Frances Wheeler, graduate student Joy Little and myself is trying to find a way to either treat or prevent cancer. Their work deals primarily with the enzyme Fatty Acid Synthase, and expanding upon the idea that by inhibiting FAS production, tumor cells themselves can be inhibited or killed.

More will surely come later as I actually start to do research with the program.