At this point I have settled into a routine at the lab. I arrive and touch base with my mentor. We discuss what I will be doing that day, why I am doing it and how it will propel my project forward. Then I get to work.
The first thing I have to do before any experiments can be accomplished is drop my slides. I know this sounds like the opposite of what anyone should do, but dropping slides is essential. I take my cell line, breathe heavily on my slide to create humidity, drop the cell line with a pipet from a height of at least three feet, and then breathe on the slide again. This combination of humidity and gravity allows the metaphase cells to burst open, exposing the chromosomes. These slides need to sit overnight to get them ready for COFISH.
If it is a COFISH (chromosome oriented fluorescence in situ hybridization) day, I will treat my slides with pepsin to eat away any remaining cytoplasm. Then I will break down the DNA to prepare it for the probes. These probes have fluorescent tags and are engineered to attach to specific sequences of DNA. This process takes anywhere from 3 hours to 6 hours depending on the method I am using that day.
Once these slides are finished, then I can look at them under the microscope. I have to take between 100 and 130 pictures per experiment, so sometimes imaging can last for more than one day. After the images are captured I have to analyze each chromosome in each image.
This overall process takes multiple days, so when I come in I will pick up where I left off the day before. Of course, everyday I have lunch with other members of my lab and discuss our different projects as well. These discussions are probably my favorite part of every day, but it certainly doesn’t hurt when an experiment goes well either!
