Peddie EXP Summer 2018

The final week of my lab was mostly uneventful because Bing had closed for the summer. The lab had sent out requests for parents to bring their children in voluntarily for research, probably with promises of cash, and the research assistants should only show up during the times that were booked by the parents. Therefore, I had more freedom and better control of the schedule since I could show up for the allotted time rather than staying for three hours waiting for Isabel to recruit children. This week's lab meeting was also the research assistant's turn to present their summer works. The lab meetings are usually done by the graduate students, but since most of the research assistants have programs that link to the lab (such as how I'm at the lab because of EXP) and most of us have to present for our programs, the lab thought it was a good opportunity for us to receive feedbacks and practice for future presentations. The meeting was attended by the whole lab, including the...

This week, I designed an in vitro conditioned media experiment to test the effects of parathyroid gland (PTG)-derived CD34+ cells on stressed human islets. To stress these cells, I cultured them for 24 hours in either replete media (control), 1% diluted media, 1% oxygen (to induce hypoxia), or both stress factors. I added SCIPCs, PTG cells, CD34- cells, or CD34+ cells to one of each category, resulting in total of 16 wells. This is the image of the well plates in the incubator for overnight culture. The next day, I looked at the conditions of the cells using a microscope and I could visibly see that islets in wells containing CD34+ cells were doing much better than all the other wells. Then, I stained the cells using propidium iodide (PI), which binds to the DNA. However, it cannot cross the membrane of live cells and thus only stains dead cells. With PI staining, I could quantify cell viability of each well using flow cytometry. As I have seen wit...