My second week’s been a bit tedious. I finished scoring behavioral
videos way before my postdoc, Giulia, thought I’d be done, which she said was impressive,
but also left her with almost no work for me to do. On the bright side, I’ve
gotten really good at reading literature and grasping main ideas, so I don’t
feel like a complete dunce anymore at meetings and journal clubs. Giulia says
that once my fingerprints get processed through their system, I’ll be
authorized to work on the benches, where I can actually get my hands dirty, so
hopefully that happens soon. On another note, I’ve been getting more time to
explore center city, and had a really great cheese steak last night, but it
kind of went downhill from there, and now I’m really regretting not getting the
taco salad instead.
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...
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