Last week was when we started the analysis of our data. At the end of the week, Nick said to me "it's one thing to collect all the data, but then it's another thing to actually ask 'what does this mean'?" which pretty much sums up my entire week. At the beginning of the week I met with Nick and Dr Lewis a couple times to see how we wanted to classify some of the questions and each time we met, he changed how he wanted us to organize the data. For example, there were a couple questions on the forms like "hobbies" or "AP classes" and if someone wrote down something that didn't fall into one of the pre-established categories, I had to put them into an "other" category. The other category ended up being too large so I spent most of the week re-sorting through all of the raw data to come up with a way to classify the data that we put in the "other" category. As I said in probably all my previous posts, it's kind of hard to explain in just a few words but the gist of it is that I spent most of the week organizing and re-organizing data because every time I met with Dr Lewis he decided we needed to change it a little bit- but I'm not complaining because it gave me a real experience of what research really entails. Later on in the week, Nick showed me how he was doing the cross analysis of the data against different criteria, and although I wasn't able to do it and I didn't know how, I really appreciated him showing me and explaining every part of it to me. This coming week is my last and although I don't think we'll have conclusive results yet, I'm planning to keep in touch with Dr Lewis so that I can keep up to date on the project.
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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