Week Two

This week has gone by pretty fast. Yesterday, Josh did a bone marrow transplant on mice. When I arrived at the lab, Josh was starting a MACS T-Cell depletion. A T-cell depletion is when you add magnetic beads to the bone marrow cells in a resuspension, and pass this through a special filter inside of a big magnet. The magnetic beads that we put into the cell solution binded to the two types of T-cells - one is the receptor CD4 for the helper T-cells, and one is the receptor CD8 for cytotoxic T-cells. The magnet traps the binded t-cells at the top, so the rest of the cell solution that filters through has no T-cells in it. We then checked to make sure the experiment worked using a FACS analysis.

Josh, Tosh, Ellen and I also went to Journal Club, a meeting organized by Carrie to talk about scientific journals and their significance to the lab. This week's journal topic discussed chimeras, which are mice with accepted foreign bone marrow received from other mice. This foreign bone marrow is what makes the mice tolerant to later receiving foreign organ transplants as well. Tolerance is a big part of the studies that go on at the TBRC, and the article was a bit difficult to understand but pretty interesting in the end. We'll be attending Journal Club meetings once a week, to keep talking about other research being done outside of our lab and to better understand new breakthroughs.

I've learned that lab work comes in bursts. Sometimes there are many experiments going on at once, but other times the postdocs have paperwork or other tasks to get done around the lab. During my down time, I've been shadowing Ellen and her postdoc, Tosh. They have been working on something a bit different than Josh's bone marrow transplants - Tosh has been studying why grafts that are not tolerated by a recipient still show signs of tumor cells being killed. The experiments that I have watched for this study involve plasmid DNA purification, cutting the plasmids with certain restriction enzymes to insert a phosphorescent marker in these plasmids, and checking these cuts through gel electropheresis. These glowing plasmids will later be inserted in the tumor cells, where we'll be able to see the cellular interactions.

Starting Out

It's hard to believe that it's already begun, but week one of my internship is almost over! As part of the SFS program, I'm going to be working at the Transplantation Biology Research Center (TBRC) of the Massachusetts General Hospital for eight weeks.

Commuting has been an interesting part of my experience in this past week. Every morning, I catch the 7:42 commuter rail into North Station, where there is a shuttle that takes all commuters into the Navy Yard and to Building 149, which is where the TBRC is located. It's always a new and interesting experience each morning to travel alone, and it makes me feel really young when I look around at all the college students and adults that are taking their normal commute in along with me!

The lab itself is amazing. When I first walked into the building that houses this research center, I was in awe of how beautiful it was. Most of the lab has a great view of the Boston Harbor. My postdoc is Josh Mollov, who graduated from Brooks in 1996. I also see Ellen Beauchamp who worked at the TBRC last summer and has come back this summer to work under another one of the fellows, Tosh. Ellen has been great at helping me get settled into the center by mentoring me and explaining lab procedures. She's also helped me find my way around the place - it is easy to get lost! Tuesday, we both went to a meeting with the entire TBRC lab.

This past week, I've been learning the basics of immunology and shadowing Josh and Ellen. Josh has been doing a few bone marrow experiments for the past couple of days, which is a complicated and long procedure to see how effective the mouse bone marrow is in reconstituting new cells, and how well it is accepted and used. Bone marrow can be obtained from mouse bones, such as the humorous and the tibia. One thing that I have learned to do as part of this experiment is the counting of cells. Counting cells is important to determine how many were taken from the mice at the beginning of the experiment, and also serves as a measure of accuracy depending on how many useful cells exist after killing off other cells, such as red blood cells and T-cells. To count cells, you have to find the correct dilution and lyse the red blood cells. After this, you are free to examine the cells in a 16-box grid and hand count the cells under a microscope. Depending on the dilution, this number could be very small or very big. Something that I've learned quickly - when you fail, just try again :)