First day at the lab wasn’t the best. I somehow walked into 5 different buildings between 8 and 8:30 when I had to be there by 8:30. I asked about 5 different people where Dr. Caram’s office is and I finally found his office around 8:40, which was 10 minutes late. I explained to him how I had a hard time finding it and he said it was fine. Dr. Caram was really nice and enthusiastic about everything. After giving me a basic tour around the lab, it was around 9 and he said he needs to go teach a class. So he basically left me in the lab space with nothing and I was just alone. Other people started to show up around 9:30. I tried to talk to a lot of them. Our group consists of 8 people. Tim, the graduate student that I have to shadow or the student that will give me the most help with, helped me download Labview, the coding program used here, on my computer. Even though I did some tutorials before I came here, I still didn’t know how to do 99.9% of the things on here. My graduate student gave me two simple yet really difficult tasks for me to do. It took me about an hour and a half to do it. I felt really stupid and I just feel like I am such a burden to this group rather than a help. But, when I finished my task, I was really happy and I felt accomplished. After all these simple coding tasks I feel like I learned a lot too. Also, I attended my first lab group meeting which consisted of two presentations from the students. To be honest, I didn’t understand anything, but it was a valuable experience because I got to know most of the people in the group.
As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been awaiting ligament, menisci, and cartilage tissue from a canine or human knee joint for (interleukin) IL-1B tissue culture. IL-1B is an inflammatory cytokine that has been proven to increase rates of tissue degeneration and osteoarthritis development in the Thompson Lab. Dr. Stoker wants me to experiment with different types of knee tissues in a co-culture with varying levels of this cytokine to determine its effects on the entire knee joint. This co-culture uses an insert permeable to the media to separate the two tissue samples from physical contact, while allowing them to share the same media. This creates an extremely accurate model for knee tissues in their native environment due to their exposure to the same synovial fluid in the joint. This model would then be treated with the IL-1B and cultured for 21 days. During these 21 days, the media would be collected every three days for biomarker evaluation at the end of the stu...
Glad you finally found the right office! I am sure your labview skills will quickly improve! (You can always work on that in the evenings if you feel like your lack of ability is hindering your ability to be helpful to the lab!)
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