Last week was another pretty productive week in the lab. My data study is coming along. A couple of key points are still missing (they're somewhere in our records, but hard to find since they go back to 2006). I also put together data on adult control samples of blood to figure out what a "normal" range is for Natural Killer cells (a type of white blood cell). This is pretty useful since the same adult volunteer can have a big range in NK cells over time, and when you're comparing them to patients it can be misleading.
I also started doing more work in the lab this week. My job was to recover a human T cell line called Jurkat cells. The Jurkat cells needed a specific medium which I put together. Then came "waking them up" which involved finding the right tube in the liquid nitrogen, and heating them quickly in a water bath. The cells are very touchy so you have to be careful and move quickly. I counted the alive cells using a hemocytometer. Every day I checked the cells under a microscope to make sure they were happy and growing. There were a lot of dead cells floating around in the flask but hopefully they don't affect the living ones.
I also started doing more work in the lab this week. My job was to recover a human T cell line called Jurkat cells. The Jurkat cells needed a specific medium which I put together. Then came "waking them up" which involved finding the right tube in the liquid nitrogen, and heating them quickly in a water bath. The cells are very touchy so you have to be careful and move quickly. I counted the alive cells using a hemocytometer. Every day I checked the cells under a microscope to make sure they were happy and growing. There were a lot of dead cells floating around in the flask but hopefully they don't affect the living ones.
Later in the week Jie, the same person helping me with the Jurkat cells, gave me a lesson in immunohistochemistry. IHC is just a way to see where different proteins exist in a tissue using antibodies. It was really interesting to see the process, it looked so hard! Each of the slides had different antibodies that would stain the proteins in the tissue in multiple steps. The next day I got to see the slides under a microscope. I was surprised to learn that when a patient gets a thymus transplant the tissue is not put in its natural place, above the heart, but around the thigh where there's more tissue for it to attach to. Under the microscope you could tell the muscle cells from the thymus cells by the shape and by a stain which only colored cells with a thymus markers. We were looking for cells with CMV, a virus, which was almost like finding a needle in a haystack. Looking at control slides of thymus tissue pre-transplantation was also really cool (the pictures above are of normal thymus tissue). Another good week...I can't believe we're almost half way done!
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