Lab work is never steady. On the one hand, there are bursts of time when I am running around trying to plate cells and my thumb feels like it will fall off if I even see another pipette. On the other hand, there are days when I sit around reading scientific journals, waiting for something to do. This was the lesson I learned during my third week at Langer Lab.
Monday morning, I changed the water for dialysis once more. Then Sarah and I poured the polymer solution into tubes that we centrifuged and then freeze-dried, so that the water could be vacuumed out. To freeze-dry them, we placed our samples in liquid nitrogen. Then the samples were put in a glass flask and into a lyopholizer, where the solvent is removed by vacuum over the course of a few days. That afternoon, I performed an MTT assay on my own, adding dye and stopping solution to macrophages and mesothelial cells, then incubating them for the night.
Tuesday morning I attended Langer Lab’s weekly summer journal club meeting, where different researchers (post-doctorates, graduate students, and undergraduates alike) present scientific journal articles that they’ve recently read while we have a group breakfast. This week’s articles were about the new HPV vaccine and DNA folding. Later that day, I changed the medium for our C2C12 muscle cells. Sarah also taught me how to store our absorbance data from the MTT assays in Excel spreadsheets and graph the data so we can track cell viability over time.
On Wednesday, things slowed down around the lab. In the morning, we had a Kohane group meeting, where we heard about current and future experiments from each researcher. Wednesday afternoon, Sarah and I took a walk to the Histology Department to drop off some dissection samples to be analyzed.
Thursday was proof that no matter how much you plan, things will still go wrong. After nine long days of growth and incubation, we discovered that our C2C12 muscle cells had all died, suddenly clearing our schedule for the day. Then we discovered that the lyopholizer had been used improperly and all the samples on it had melted, including the polymer that we had started making a week and a half ago. We were able to save some samples, but we still lost a lot. After a few hours of reading journals and studying for class, we went with another researcher to an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machine and analyzed some sugars.
Friday the 13th was actually a much luckier day than Thursday. We were able to plate 10 sets of C2C12 cells that will grow for the next nine days. We also started making a new PXC-M polymer; to finish it will take all of next week and perhaps even some time in the following week.
There were good days, bad days, busy days, and even a few quiet days in the lab this week. Back at Harvard though, things were pretty busy. I spent most of my evenings reviewing for class and catching up on my summer reading. Class is going well; I spent some time at Brain Break on Tuesday night with the tutor for my section, reviewing while we drank hot chocolate and ate cookies. After 3 ½ hours of class on Thursday evening I was pretty tired, but I still found myself eating ice cream in the dorm at 12:30 am with some friends.
This weekend I’m bringing a few Brooks friends back to my house for some well-deserved homecooked meals and relaxation. Sunday we’ll be back, ready for whatever week four will bring.
Have a great week!
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