Peddie EXP Summer 2018

    Week 7 has certainly been a whirlwind. For our experiment, we essentially wanted to compare the DNA damage in the muscle stem cells (MuSCs) of injured mice with those of non-injured mice. However, our experiment which tested for DNA damage using the biomarker 53BP1 didn't quite work out. When my postdoc Elisia imaged the MuSCs in the microscope room, she looked at the DAPI (nuclei) staining and the 53BP1 staining to see if they overlapped; an overlap of the two stains would indicate DNA damage. While the DAPI staining successfully indicated the nuclei of the MuSCs, the biomarker 53BP1 had stained both the cells and their background. 53BP1 therefore proved to be ineffective at indicating the DNA damage we were looking for. Subsequently, Elisia decided to perform this experiment using a different biomarker, one that would reliably indicate DNA damage. I then spent the first half of Week 7 repeating this experiment using the biomarker Gamma-H2AX, which stains for double-...

     I started work on June 4, just a week after spring term exams. Thankfully I didn't have much trouble finding my lab's building because I had visited it in fall term for an interview. For the duration of my lab, I start work at 9:30 AM and end at 5 PM.      "We're going to the mouse room to injure some mice," my postdoc voiced, walking me to said mouse room. It was only my first day in lab; talk about hitting the ground running. After selecting two boxes of mice in a room lined with shelves of them, my postdoc Dr. Elisia Tichy, or Elisia as we call her, explained to me that she would injure the muscles of the mice. To do so, she anesthetized them and injured their target muscles using injections of notexin, an enzyme found in snake venom. The notexin injuries would cause the muscle stem cells of the mice to activate and divide in abundance. Next week, we will collect their muscle stem cells and analyze them using telomere assays ...