My Job Is Fun

So this week ended up being... a little productive at work, if not at school. I have all kinds of file now and have been doing all sorts of reading about Bio and Chem. Holy CRAP do they have a lot of acronyms, I thought physics was bad. And all the ones I learned from the papers endedd up being different than the ones that we use in my lab so I have all kinds of Bio terms gumming up the works in my brain for no good reason. I think it is some sort of plot to keep me down.

This picture is the icon I have on my iMac for my research files from the Mahoney group. I thought it was fitting, but we don't really keep mice in jars of green liquid with transmitters implanted in their heads, we only use rats. And speaking of rats, my adviser... I'll call her RatMaster, until I come up with something more permanent... had a terrible time this week because the dissection of the rats for our cells went badly this week. Good ole Captain Bucketleg cheered her up on Friday by calling the rat company and learning that RatMaster has been ordering the wrong rats, for a long time. Now normally this would be bad news, but she took it well, because it means that it was the rat and not her that was screwing up the dissection. We needed this little pickmeup because our cells were dying like crazy! The above is what is supposed to happen to our gels. First we have a lot of fibrin and all PEG, then we mix em (the third picture) and then we take it out and get the last picture. Now if you are confused because the second and last pictures are completely black, well so was I at first, but it just so happens that we pick up the Fibrin with an identifier that reflects back red light, and the PEG does not. So when we see black screen where we knew we had lots of red before, we say HURRAY we got the fibrin out! So what you are seeing is 1) All Fibrin; 2) All PEG; 3) Fibrin + PEG; 4) PEG(w/ holes) - Fibrin.

So on friday I got to watch while RatMaster used the Pascal Imager which is a HUGE microscope that has an laser fed into it from an even larger apparatus which fills about a fourth of the room this thing resides in. It shines different wavelengths of laser light on the sample, one is a pretty blue I don't think i am supposed to look at but do, and it reacts with the indicators and then feeds the image to a computer where we make little movies or slideshows of the output. In this way we got a three dimensional view of what is going on in our gel... which is not what is supposed to be going on in our gel. Here is what we should see, if we were using Pure PEG. The green are living cells and the red dots are dead ones. We should have saw a lot of green with little green arms hanging out. But we didn't we saw a bunch of red, lots and lots and lots of red. It was like a big red cell graveyard I tell ya. But on a more positive note, we did have something in our sample that looked like a rope, that was pretty interesting. I begged Rachael to take a picture of it for me, but she didn't want anyone to see a rope looking thing in her sample so she wouldn't do it, even when I promised to be her bestest friend forever. That takes a lot of pride. So I keep on learning more and more stuff about the lab, and have even learned how to use excel for something useful! Keeping track of the Squirrel Dissention trends