Peddie EXP Summer 2018

So, change of plans on receiving the human islet cells for live testing. I talked to Charlie and he said that the human islet cell supplier might not be able to have any cells in stock for the foreseeable future. The problem with obtaining human islets is that they’re extremely hard to come by, since they have to be sourced from recently deceased, young, healthy organ donors. It’s understandable that there aren’t many “in stock”. I asked Charlie about subbing in mouse islets since those could be harvested at will, but he explained that each mouse only has a small fraction of the islets that a human does, so we would need to sacrifice 80-100 mice for just this project – an ethical choice that I am happy to avoid having to make. Fingers crossed that I receive them before I leave California though! After the past two weeks, I successfully fabricated a few more hollow fiber cartridges that were suitable for in vitro tests. I tested them all for water flow rates with this pump setu...

Hi Everyone! After arriving in San Francisco last Sunday, I spent this past week settling into the downtown Berkeley apartment that I’ll be sharing with Rohit for the next couple of months, as well as learning my way around the Roy lab at UCSF. First day at the lab was really exciting. Here are a couple pictures of the Mission Bay campus, which was completed just a few years ago. Everything is super new and modern, and there’s still construction for other buildings going on around the campus. Most of the people who work at the Mission Bay campus are either professional researchers or doctors/nurses for the nearby hospital. The graduate students take most of their classes at the original Parnassus campus (where Maya is). I work in Byers Hall, which is connected to Genentech Hall and a short walk down the block from the shuttle stop. There are three other volunteers working for the Roy lab this summer – Kimmai, David, and Pujita, who are all undergrad college students...