I know it is just the beginning of the week, but I wanted to give an update because I did something different today. I got to play with dry ice! Just kidding, you can't play with it and you need to be careful with the dry ice because it is very cold and can burn you.
I was helping out someone in the lab who needed to access certain mouse brain slides from the freezer. Basically when they sliced up the mice brains they mounted all the slices on slides and now they found out what regions of the brain they specifically need to look at so they are accessing slides with those particular regions.
The slides need to be kept frozen, so we had to stand in the cold room (basically a small room that feels like you are standing in an industrial sized freezer) and leave the slides in their box sitting on dry ice so they stay cold. Then, the person I was working with would look at the tiny brain slices on the slide to figure out which ones had the regions they were looking for.
It was a cool experience, but I had dressed for a typical Arizona summer, so I was freezing! Anyway I'll make more updates throughout the week.
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Hello again!
I wasn't able to do mouse brain imaging today because someone else is using the microscope, so instead I was taught how to make gels for DNA testing the mice. Basically with electrophoresis DNA samples are placed in wells on the gel, and then the gel is put in a tank with a current running through it. Smaller pierces of DNA are pulled through the gel more quickly than larger pieces, so at the end there are distinct bands of different DNA pieces in the gel. Looking at the banding pattern tells the lab whether the mouse is normal, a knockout mouse, or a heterozygous mouse, and it also confirms the sex of the mouse.
I attached a picture of the banding on the gel after it had been run, and the electrophoresis tank that the gel was put in. The bands aren't that differentiated because we didn't leave it in very long since it was just practice.
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Hope everyone is having a great Friday!
I didn't get to work on imaging the mouse brain slides much this week because other people were using the microscope, but I did get to learn a lot of new things. Besides the gel electrophoresis experiment I mentioned above, I got to learn how to run the dishwasher for lab equipment, and I shadowed a lab employee who was getting training on how to test the lab for radiation.
Have a nice weekend!
