The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observations of Andy Cole

I have been really busy recently getting a graduate school application ready. I got my least letter of recommendation arranged today. The application has to be in by the first, but I am hoping that they will not be too off put by my recommendations coming in after that. I called them last week to see if this would disqualify me, but they said so long as the app is in it shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully not, but I really don't have much hope left in me after talking to my principle investigator today. So about that...

Turns out she didn't know that I was a physics major. And for some odd reason, this is very important to me. I don't understand it, but I'm all upset about it. Seems that it might have been a fluke that I got to work in the Mahoney lab. Someone forgot to flag my research request with 'non ChemE', and I've been playing in the lab not knowing that I was illegitimate. So I went to work in lab today and the entire time I was thinking, "what the hell have I done! I'm not supposed to be here, I should be in a fricking physics lab right now." And to tell the truth I was just plain embarrassed, being around people I respect but still being that damned fool pretending to be a duck when he's obviously a toad.

Ha, well, I lied, it seems I do understand it after all. See, I have emotions... sometimes.

WOOT Go ANDY!

Some Photos

Here are some pictures of hydrogels. I took these pictures to show the difference between those that were rotated during polymerization and those that were not. In the pictures the grain you see is the fibrin, thats the material we were trying to get to NOT settle by rotating.

The hydrogels:

Gradient from no rotation

No Gradient! Notice that there is little fibrin on the outside edges!

Another gel with gradient from no rotation.

A well mixed sample from rotation. This one looks very promising. That blue you see towards the top is probably from the ink on the glass that I am imaging through

Winter Break 2006-07

It's been a long time, so lets do some catching up.

Lab Related Stuff:
I recently went into the lab and took some pictures so that I could put them on the group webpage. I'll put a few of them throughout this post so you can all get a good look at what a tissue engineering lab looks like. Actually, it look remarkably similar to many other biological laboratories but it would crush the frail grad students if people went around telling them that.

Not much has been happening in the lab since the break started. Splinter and myself have started a new batch of cells, which are currently on their way out. Since polymers are our current problem, with the new set we tried two NEW polymer's we called EVA and MRK 23. We have been pretty surprised by the results, the cells seem to be living pretty well in both, but EVA control turned into liquid about a week after encapsulation... which is no good at all. The picture to the right is of Rachael Mooney (Splinter) preparing our samples to be looked at under the Confocal microscope, which will be shown below. We took some images on Friday of last week, they looked good, but were not all the spectacular. We really expected a lot more neurite growth, but it is okay, because we only got through the EVA samples before we had to leave, and we froze the rest so we could image them on Monday. I think that the MRK 23 samples will have much better neurite growth. I have nothing to base that on but pure hope.

So here is what the confocal looks like. The thing has its own laser system that puts out a lot of heat, which is problematic when you are imaging in the dark in a small room. That combination easily puts poor Andy to sleep during confocal sessions.

We are trying to get good images to put in our publication to show evidence that we did in fact increase neurite growth and extension. But with all the crappy polymer, this is a very difficult task. I think that next semester we are going to try to quantify it by other means so we are not dependent on being able to see the neurites, which are surprisingly difficult to see even under 40x magnification on the confocal.


In one of my courses, we had a project where we had to build a circuit that we found ourselves. Well, I like to come up with these kinds of things on my own, so I designed my own circuit for something I needed. I called it a syringe rotisserie, which would be a mechanical device that turned syringes really slowly. My plan was to build the circuit and forget about it, but as it happens, it was decided by the higher ups that something like that would be really useful in the lab. The completed circuit got me a C in the class, but for some reason these crazies in the lab still wanted it, so I had a conference with my father about the feasibility of coming up with the mechanical side of the project. We talked about this a lot when I went home for break, and after several design changes we finally came up with something that I believe will work, and after getting a crappy start on it myself I left for Colorado and left him to build the mechanics. Above is the portion of the sterile hood that this device has to fit in, under that UV lamp. By the way, those are Splinters hands. I told her that she was gunna be the new Country Crock butter hand person because of this photo. And just to rat her out, she didn't spray her hands before putting them in the hood! This is a no no.

So, life around the lab is pretty uneventful. I have taken to task, trying to figure out why the polymer always comes out differently. Splinter thinks it is a lost cause, but I am sure there is something subtle that is going wrong, and that is my specialty. So that is all about the lab for now. The next post will be about me and my adventures so far this break.

To the right here is our exploded hood that has been hanging around the lab since this summers excitement. This is a very large portion of any tour I give of the lab. If the confocal room is closed I spend a lot of time telling people about how awesome our exploded hood is.

Andy

Get Ready, Im Coming BACK!

Hey everyone that reads this nonsense,

Get ready! Im am coming back. My semester of hell is over and the grades are coming. They are crappy as hell, but I am very proud of myself for hanging in there and keeping sane for the most part. Next semester is going to be a lot easier, and I hope to patch up my GPA with it. So alls that is left is updating my blog, cleaning up my apartment (I cease to do that when stressed, and stressed I have been), scheduling the GRE's and getting apps ready for grad school.

I recieved a digital camera for Festive Holiday, and so I'll be getting pictures of the lab next time I go in. I plan for my next post to be about my lab and what I am up to. I also have tons of stories from the break and semester, so its gunna be a long one. I hope everyone is ready!

Andy

Busy Busy Busy

So, right now I exist in the lower rings of hell. You know, the one where the three headed devil is munching on the sinners. Now, I'm not much of a sinner, but I did declare physics as my major, and apparently that is a bad enough sin to get me here. Anyway, I have been really busy, but one of the things I am making in this hell I exist in is a mock group page for the group I do research with. This is for my EBIO class, check out the page I am making at: Mahoney Group Mock Page

Im Back

Just so people know, I have been away for a while on break. I didn't actually go anywhere, just took a break. I did a lot of work in the lab, but it was just another Kinetics Assay, seeing if we could get all the fibrin out of the gels in under 6, 3, 2, 1 hours. That Mon, Tues, Wed, and some of Thursday last week, and since then I have just been hanging out reading and playing WOW a little. BTW Warriors get the shaft in WOW, in case you didn't know. So I hope to update with something substantial after Tuesday, probably next weekend actually, so don't get too anxious.

Andy

New Developments

So I had an idea last Tuesday night, and it had to do with Splinters disappointment in our preliminary analysis of the Kinetic Assay. I don't want to sound like a dissenter, but I have a hard time believing that what we are doing doesn't work, it just doesn't make sense to me that it wouldn't work. And believe me, I started off not believing this whole heartedly, but I have thought about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that it is RIGHT. So Splinter says, all disappointed like, "Well, we still have fibrin in the gels, so our experiment is a failure." Or something to that effect.

So I says to her today I says, "I was thinking to myself the other day, I thinks, 'Andy you are damned cool.'"

And then I says to her, "You know I was thinking about what you said Monday, about our gels not being porous because of the fibrin still being present. I don't buy it. Why does having some fibrin in the gel mean that it isn't porous? It doesn't, it just means that there is still fibrin there. I think what we should do is prove that the pores are bigger than they were before by putting the gels into a media that has a concentration of some molecule of a size bigger than what the normal PEG pore is and see if it diffuses into the gel. That would prove to ME that we had larger pores or not."

And Splinter being the master of knowledge that she is considered this idea and gave it a thumbs up, and she started considering just how we were going to set up this new experiment! It hadn't occurred to me at that point that the pores had to be large enough to let the fibrin out of the gel, because that was what our experiment we just did WAS, so we know our pores are at least that large! So I suppose we need to step it up by a few microns above fibrin.

This idea and our miraculous data from the Kinetic Assay, which did end up showing us what we wanted to know, verifying the Boss Lady's (Dr. Mahoney) idea that the majority of the fibrin that leaves the gel leaves within the first twenty-four hours. And furthermore it is, like most things that are of any interest to anyone, an exponential decay. Another thing it kinda shows is that the concentration is dependent on there being fibrin in the media, because before the 24hr time point we didn't change media, and after that point we did and looky there it went down again after it appeared to have leveled off. So with this knowledge I bet we will change the media a couple of times before the 24hr point from now on.

Why is Thanksgiving Break Always a Week Away???

Well, some good news and some bad news. One piece of good news is that I just got done talking to a very pretty young lady from my O-chem class last semester, I really like her hair, so every time I see her I have to ask her about it. I think it appeals to the OCD part of me because usually when people put multiple colors in their hair it is very disorganized and chaotic, but not hers, her hair is very orderly.

So talking to pretty women aside, there have been plenty of other developments. Firstly, we had thought, and I reported hear that we thought all our polymer is screwed, that was a false alarm, only a lot of our polymer was screwed. So since we had some polymer left we carried forth our Kinetic Assay of our hydrogels to see how much fibrin left our porous polymers at specific time points. We were initially planning to do 4 hour intervals over the period of 24 hours, but then Splinter wussed out on that and moved it to 6 hour intervals. Splinter wussed out again when she was comfortable in bed at 4:00am and decided that we didn't Really need the 4am data point. So, we got to mash everything up with the vibrators on monday and today we will start doing the data analysis, Rachael is not overly optimistic about the results, but I think it worked spectacularly, AND I got an idea of how to make it even better! And I had another idea of how to make it better last night right before I went to be, and now I cant remember what it was, but I bet I'll remember it soon and it will be earth shattering.

In other news, School sucks! While I was waiting for someone to show up at the lab at 4am on friday, I finally made sense of Topology, but unfortunately I haven't had time to actually get to doing anything about that, its pretty disappointing. And tomorrow I'll have a Midterm in Electronics Lab, over how LITTLE we fricking know about circuits.

And I'll probably update this more as the week progresses.

Andy