Nonsensical Nothings: labs

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

labs

today was my last day of labs. what have i been doing?

my supervisor is really nice. she celebrated epiphany with us on january 6th. it's the 12th day of christmas when the 3 kings or wise men arrived in bethlehem. in france, where she's from, they celebrate by having a galette which traditionally contains a bean inside, and they cut the cake and whoever gets the bean is the king (or queen) of the day. the youngest person is supposed to not look while they cut the cake (in case the bean pops out) and then assign the pieces to everyone. i was the youngest so i had to turn around while she cut and then assign the pieces to people. i didn't get the bean but she had bought paper crowns for everyone from france so we each got one as a souvenir. she had even gotten into trouble at immigration for bringing the galette and the crowns.

then we found out when her birthday was and got her a cake

but besides that, we have been doing work. we did cell culture stuff to investigate the delivery of drugs to tumour cells. we prepared vesicles and complexes and tested them on cancer cell lines. some days we had to stay til 8pm but some days were short.

we seeded plates with cells in growth media (didn't take pictures of this but they're pink like the following picture, in plates like the second picture) and incubated them. then we sucked out the media and treated the cells with the vesicles or complexes or controls, and we incubated them again.

this is a series of dilutions for one treatment. the pink is from the medium.

then we sucked out the treatment and analysed them with the mtt assay which colours living cells purple. we used columns 2-11. as you can see from this picture, the cells are dead in column 2 which has the highest concentration of treatment.