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.