Lab update!

For those who don't know, I've been doing my PhD for 5 weeks now... meaning I have 150 weeks left to go (oh yay). The last month has pretty much consisted of me trying to complete reading associated with my topic and trying to formulate a plausible hypothesis. The hypothesis is a work in progress, the reading varies depending on how much my brain and I are getting along. Regardless, this was pretty much my first week of doing any experimental work - mostly refreshing stuff and learning how this lab is run.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I did some immunoflurescence of retina sections, staining for glutamine synthetase for astrocytes and Muller cells, and staining for KIR. I don't know what KIR stains for. What a culture shock!!! I came from working in a lab that did things for various hospitals and therefore had somewhat stringent EHS stuff going on, to a lab where people don't even wear latex gloves!!! Taking into consideration my lab time over the summer, I had several heart attacks watching pipettes being thrown into normal bins (i.e. NOT biohazard - admittedly it was used for pipetting non-toxic buffers - but that's not the point) *shudder*. Abrezh the other new PhD student comes from an optometry (i.e. clinical, not laboratory) background, so I was asked to keep an eye on him to teach him good lab habits. But how can I teach him that when Erica's making up sucrose solution by pouring the powered sucrose into a jar, pouring in distilled water...and then SHAKING it?! I said something like "...er....shouldn't you be spinning that?" to which I got the response, "This does the same thing." Later when we were talking about how to do a dilution, I told Abrez that you put the diluting buffer into an eppendorf tube, remove the volume of the antibody from the buffer, and then put in the antibody...to which another lab member said to me "Oh, this is bucket science. When you're making a 1:1000 dilution, if you dont take out that microlitre, it doesn't make much of a difference." Oh yes it does!!! It completely changes the dilution!!! Anyway, I'm assured that this is how research labs work - I can either stick to my anal, but scientifically correct habits, or I'll adjust to their relaxed ones. We'll see who wins.

Today, I was inducted into the departmental Histology lab and then taught how to use the cryostat. The cryostat is a like a microtome, except it's used to cut snap-frozen tissue. After the demonstration by the lab manager, Faye, I spent about 20 minutes of so on the machine trying to cut some sections of mouse brain. On the whole, I was generally ok, except for a giant wrinkle that I kept getting right down the centre of the section. Faye assured me that for my first ever time, my sections were pretty damn good (woohoo!), so I hopped over to Path and the SNS for a little show and tell. After inspecting them by eye and under the microscope, my sections were met with rapturous declarations about how good they were and that we should stain them for H&E for posterity. Unfortunately, since the sections hadn't dried properly onto the slides, they floated off and were not salvageable. Poor Veronika who suggested the idea was quite upset, while Paul just said "Oh, maybe you should have fixed them in acetone" and was met with glares and the question "Well why didn't you suggest that before?!" Ahhh...it feels good to be back into a working lab.

Preview for the day - I've seen V for Vendetta, the review will be coming soon!