Day 6 - Of Mice and Men

I headed up to the lab in Memorial Hermann once again, starting new lab work that I wasn't familiar with yet. I first went to see the mice that the doctors had been working with so far, and waited out after they had to collect the red blood cells and bone marrow derived macrophages from the mice. They took the long bones of the mouse, cleaned off all the muscle, and flushed out all the bone marrow of all of its cells.
Then, the docor filtered the cells to get rid of the remaining connective tissue that he didn't need, and spun them down in the centrifuge. He then resuspended them in ACK Buffer for five minutes, to get make the red blood cells burst, as he only needed to the bone marrow derived macrophages for these cell cultures. They were then spun down again to get rid of the red blood cells, and just have bone marrow pellets at the bottom of the flasks. The remaining bone marrow macrophages were resuspended in the media, and plated in the cell culture flasks with 20mls of total media. The cells now have to be cultured for a week.

Afterwards, in the afternoon, I had gone to the other doctor that I was shadowing yesterday, and she showed me the gels that she ran yesterday. She was also able to show me the results she had gotten, which were bands on the gel, which showed the proteins in the cell.

Besides those two experiments, it was a much slower day in the lab today compared to yesterday, as well as last week, yet I still do feel like I've learned a lot more about the mice aspects of the cancer and immunotherapy research that they are doing in this lab. Afterwards I headed home, ending another day of my J-Term.

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