Hey guys, Allie here. This week started off with my first lab meeting on Monday. It was really interesting with everyone there talking about their own progress and also discussing how to answer some new questions in the lab. For most of the week I went on entering data from flow charts on patient's NK cells. Several of the records went back to 2006 so the data had to be re-gated for my specific study. Jen taught me how to use a program called FlowJo, which lets you interpret the data straight from the flow cytometry lab, which was fun.
When I wasn't working on data analysis Dr. Devlin and Dr. Markert spent time teaching me about other important concepts in the lab. Patients with atypical DiGeorge are born with some T cells, but because the babies are athymic the T cells can't recognize self from non-self. These T cells are likely to bind with self antigens and proliferate. The result is large oligoclonal populations and a terrible rash for the patient. Spectratyping is a tool that uses RNA to show you the diversity of the T cell receptors. An atypical patient might show a large T cell population but with spectratyping you'd find they had only a few oligoclonal populations, as opposed to a normal very diverse population.
On Friday, David, the undergrad, brought his samples to the DNA sequencing lab so I tagged along. Instead of just dropping off the tubes with the lab, we got to sequence it ourselves which involved combining the DNA with a mix of primers, enzymes and nucleotides (some fluorescent) and loading the samples into the machine, the very very expensive machine. The actual process was a little anticlimactic but learning about the how the process and machinery all worked was interesting. All in all it was another good week. Soon I'll get to do more bench work along with the continuing data analysis, so I'm looking forward to that. Hope everyone is having a great weekend!