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-...