January Update

I went to mentorship twice this week: Monday and Friday.

Monday was a 9:30am to 3:00pm day beginning in the tissue culture lab, where mentor was handling a flasks of epithelial cell culture under the ventilation hood.  A little bit about tissue culture: you cannot keep your cells in the same media for too long lest they die.  As the cells grow, it can get a bit crowded, as you can imagine, and the cells must be split up.  Furthermore, the cells tend to start sticking to the walls of their flask after a while.  To detach them, they are treated with trypsin, which hydrolyzes the peptide bonds in the protein attaching the cells to the flask wall.  The trypsin must be deactivated with a neutralizing medium, as prolonged exposure to it will damage the cells.  The cells are then spun down, resuspended, and split.  In this case, my mentor split the cell into three flasks, giving them fresh medium to feed on.

cells in growth medium

After this culture business, we attended a meeting on general lab safety, then began on tar extraction.  It was glorious, magical, fantastic - like the last I participated in it.  We pounded tar to a powder!  Upon completing most of the process (we ended at a lengthier step and never proceeded to the next), I cleaned up at a lab adjacent to ours, had a chat with Mr. Webster, and worked with an intern as she pressed pellets of a drug we are looking into.  It's another sustained-drug-release project.  She, in turn, showed me how to operate the solicitor.  It's quite simple.  You must place whatever you are sonicating into a falcon tube, fill the tube with water, simply place it in the solicitor (pretty much a container of water) and turn the thing on.  Low frequency sound is generated.  This is one form of maceration - the breaking up of something.  Maceration can be chemical (ex: acid) or mechanically (ex: metal pestle, sonication).  

My day ended, then.  

On Friday, I worked the microtome.  I took some pictures with my cell-phone, which I shall add here shortly (upon figuring out how to transfer photos from my phone to this computer…).  I mounted a resin block onto the segment arc, which I attached to the trimming block, and that onto the stage trimmed the block with a metal blade first, then a moved on the glass, fixing the segment arch onto the cantilever arm.  The actually cutting of the resin was a challenge for me, though, and it came out all messy and rough.

End of the day surprise: free books!  There were just piled there at the end of the hallway by the microtome.  I 'd heard that best ones were taken days ago… but I managed to find Shakespeare!  Hopefully there are still some left for me to rummage through next week…    

As far as independent learning goes, I found a courses on astrobiology and climate change on Coursera.  The latter is a possible independent component idea.  We shall see.