A day in the Zhuang is a continuing series of experiments that may extend a whole week or maybe a few days. I’ll lock the bike up, push the elevator button for the 3rd floor, say my salutations, put on the my nitrile gloves and we’re off.
Ian, my secondary mentor, usually picks out the game plan, but the average day goes like this:
We typically start off, running a gel from the DNA strands we copied using PCR the day before. This only serves to confirm the genotype of the mice we’ve been staining and observing. After that comes mouse work. We’ll starting thymi and the race to extract thymi the fastest is on – it’s always a one-sided race, one in which Ian always wins. We’ll squish those cells up to extract the T-cells and go through a series of centrifuging to get just T cells.
Next step we usually go through the staining of our T-Cells. Now, this took me 4 weeks to fully comprehend, but for every mice we put a 1 microliter stain of each antibody and 50 microliters of phosphate buffered saline (PBS) AKA Facs buffer. These are necessary so we can see our cells using the Flow Cytometer.
While, this is going on Ian puts on Pandora. We’ll go from Tupac to Pink Floyd, and fluctuate between old school rap and rock while doing extractions. Of course, futbol’s on so when the time comes we blast the speakers to see who’s one step closer to winning the world’s most prestigious athletic accolade.
FINALLY, when ALL of the staining mix has settled with our cells, we are now able to look at them using the Flow Cytometer. The stains we put in bind to specific proteins and receptors, so we can tell which cells were in our mice.
From then on out we discuss our results, see what we can do tomorrow, lyse some tail for a gel tomorrow, and place in the PCR machine. I’ll get some more papers to read and we’ll watch some more metric football and call it a day!
