Skip to main content

MIchelle Lu - Wow this is frustrating

Thank god I chose to stay here for 9 weeks because 6 weeks is honestly not enough! Even with antibody staining after antibody staining and 4 hour sessions on the confocal microscope, only now are we finally starting to collect usable data. As I've learned from my past month here, most of lab is troubleshooting, figuring out what to do next when (because it will) something goes wrong. I've realized that in order to be a successful scientist, you must stay optimistic and open-minded. If you are the kind of person that gives up the second something goes wrong, you'll walk in and walk out of the lab in less than 10 minutes. But even with an open and optimistic mindset, it can get extremely frustrating at times. Just last week, Anna and I were trying to learn how to use a program called Imaris to quantify the images we got after spending the whole week harvesting the tissue, sectioning it and staining it - a process that takes the whole week. Then, once we're sitting in front of Imaris, we realize the images are incompatible and we have to retake them. Since we are measuring for intensity, if we reuse the same samples too many variables are added in, so we have to redo the entire process. While it was definitely a good thing that we realized sooner than later, it was still incredibly annoying that those images that we spent so much time on creating were practically useless. Nevertheless, Anna and I remained positive as we wasted no time in creating the next couple of images. We should be ready to process and analyze the images tomorrow and hopefully get some pretty pictures to add to our dataset. 





Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 22, 2018 at 5:27 PM

    Keep at it! As you are learning, scientific research involves figuring out why you didn't get the results you expected and lots of troubleshooting to just get things to work. But you will also find a tremendous sense of accomplishment when it does work! You will get there!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...
3 comments
Read more