Is it?

By Nik Papageorgiou.

Somehow, in the lab, there is always something else that needs doing — cells to tend, papers to read, colleagues’ questions to answer. Only yesterday the ceiling of the tissue culture suite collapsed under a weight of water from a malfunctioning condensation collector and we had to mop up 20 liters of water from the floor as well as hundreds of dripping chunks of ceiling material that looked and felt almost exactly like a dog’s breakfast. The only good part about this episode was being allowed to crack open the shiny “Chemical Spills Kit” and use the fluffy pink absorbent cloths and sand for the first time — but that’s another story.

I always find it amazing how productive I can be at home. One would think that distractions would abound — food, tea, the internet — with no watchful eyes to catch you straying. But in my case, I always end up being far more focused. The hours slid away, interrupted only by a spate of laundry and the need to dash out five or six times to pull clothes from the sunny, wind-swept line before they got re-soaked by repeated cloudbursts. Otherwise I was one with my spreadsheets — and even found myself enjoying them.

Tomorrow I have a queue of experiments as long as my arm, but until then, this serenity is all mine.

The morning started off quite quietly. All my ocd-ishness (why yes, I do colour-code my revision notes, why do you ask) was satisfied when Alan and I helped to sort out and organize Jenny’s old experiment slides into numerical order, and then arrange them snugly in a cardboard box to go into the cold room.

I got to interview Jenny for my project on cancer, and asked her about current treatments and about the mechanisms involved when a cell becomes cancerous. It was really fun, and we filmed the interview on her Flip HD. It was the first time I’d ever done an interview about science, and even after this great week we’ve had I have to admit I was a bit nervous about trying to be coherent on tape!

Then in the afternoon it was time to go down to the confocal microscope and see our results! First we looked at the controls, and as we expected we saw they were normal, round, healthy, happy looking cells. And then we moved on to the gene knockdown cells. My cells had gone all spiky! (Though not as spiky as Tweet and Spike, mind you). They were full of stress lines and had got really big. It was an exciting moment! We took lots of photos and a few stacks too. Jenny said my results were quite interesting, so I hope I was able to make some tiny contribution to her research (and of course if she wins the Nobel Prize I expect a mention! )

Overall I have to say that I’ve enjoyed my week here more than I know how to explain – it’s been an amazing opportunity to see and try techniques and use professional equipment, working under real lab conditions and learning so much from Jenny. It’s confirmed everything I thought about wanting to study science and become a scientist. Jenny’s enthusiasm for her work also really inspired me to work hard and do well, to achieve as much as I can and find projects to explore with just that kind of enthusiasm too.

Thank you Jenny for such a totally completely awesome and fantastic week!

Today we encountered a new room, the cold room (where we’d left the western blot membranes overnight) – this is literally a giant walk-in fridge. It was pretty cool (in both senses) until we realised to our horror that there was no panic switch. I can imagine how you’d feel if you accidentally got locked inside – it was so cold! We then got down to the serious business of preserving our HeLa cells in formaldehyde, and then washing it off countless times back in the lab. It was quite theraputic once you got into the rhythm of suctioning off all the liquid in the wells and then pipetting in some more.

After we finally got that done, it was back to the western blot and of course passing through the tardis down into the dark room! This time Alan and I got to have a go at making the images; I did a ten second one, and then Alan did a thirty second one. We discovered a very good way of counting time, as Jenny and I both realised I was counting to a beat – it was quite danceable, and we transformed the room into the dark room disco! But only for thirty seconds. Alan was the only sensible one of us as we stared menacingly at the machine waiting for it to feed out the results.

Once again I’ve really enjoyed today, and tomorrow I’m hoping to interview Jenny and, with any luck, her colleage Oscar too for my extended project.

The special guests of the blog tonight! Allow me to introduce Spike and Tweet! Surely you can see Spike’s human-like qualities and Tweet’s uncanny resemblance to a (possibly psychotic) baby bird?

Spike

Tweet

So we moved on to the teenager across the lab. This guy is hooked up to the computer so we can take a couple of images, a handy improvement. He has also has a UV light to look at stained parts of the cells. But he is a grumpy so and so, it takes seven switches to get him out of bed and ready to work in the mornings. Seven! He has good and bad days I hear. But today he decided that his fine focus wasn’t going to work. So it took some nifty jiggery pokery (technical term) from Jenny to get the photos just right.

But tomorrow we get to use the biggest and baddest beast of them all. This guy is mental. The Don. Jenny showed him to us for the first time yesterday and he even has his own office. Despite his busy schedule we also get to have another go with him tomorrow to look at our Hela cells, im very excited about this part. The images are crazy mixtures of shapes and colour. I can’t wait. Fingers crossed all goes well.
☺

(There’s one more vid of day 1 to come, then I need to process and upload the rest of the video. There’s a lot!)

When we went downstairs to the darkroom, just getting through the door was exciting; it was like a tardis! You have to walk into a small circular chamber which you spin round, and at one point you are in total darkness before emerging into the darkroom. You could easily imagine yourself traveling through time! Maybe my imagination was working overtime, but I found it very exciting. What we did next was even cooler; once everyone was in the darkroom (which wasn’t actually dark yet, as all the lights were on) Jenny sorted out the work space and then plunged us back into total darkness until our eyes adjusted to the faint red lights. Jenny then took x-rays of the membranes with the proteins and antibodies on them and we waited for the results to print out.

After comparing our results back at the lab we discovered that there was a potential problem: one of the controls looked the same as the modified samples instead of looking like the other two controls. This could mean two things: either the entire experiment had failed and we’d have to do it again, or it was simply that the control was protein-deficient in general. If it was the latter, it would be fine. But we could not be sure this was the case until we tested it with a completely different antibody that should show up the same on all the samples: if the control truly was protein-deficient, then the x-ray line would be fainter. We shall find out tomorrow, the mystery plot continues…

And now we come to the highlight of the day: the super confocal microscope! It was absolutely awesome. We went downstairs with Jenny and her collection of slides to a small room with a cool swanky looking microscope which had a separate set of dials and was linked up to a computer where we could see the images of the cells. The first one was a normal control cell where they all looked round and happy. Jenny then put on a slide where a gene had been knocked out and this had made the cells all spiky. And they were so spiky! So we got to search for a cell that looked particularly impressive, and when we put it up on the screen I swear it looked like a person. Well, a cell with a bit sticking out that looked a bit like a head, with a very spiky torso, two misshapen arms, one leg and a tail. We named it Spike, which we thought was very appropriate. But the next one we found was even more impressive, being spikier and more dramatic than Spike. Perhaps no one else really saw it this way, but I was pretty sure that it looked like a very spiky bird on a very thorny branch, with a huge strange pointy slug sitting randomly in the top right corner of the field. But it got a name too – we called it Tweet.

I used my phone to take loads of photos of Jenny and Alan doing cool things in the lab (mostly working in the hood and making the gel for the proteins), but unfortunately they seem to be stuck in there and so I can’t show them to everyone yet. Though hopefully I’ll be able to post the images from the microscope soon. They looked so amazing and beautiful – and as they looked quite alien, for once I think calling them “out of this world” really is appropriate.

So I’m looking forward to another day in the lab, and with any luck we’ll get to see our results! And then the day after that, we’ll see our cells that have had a gene knocked down – and I’ll be able to see how getting rid of Jenny’s pet gene affects the shape of my cells!

But it wasn’t until this morning that we got to have a good look at our cells and see how they were doing. As Alex has previously said, we did have a slight problem with the concentrations resulting in a bit of overcrowding but it wasn’t too bad and this morning the cells were looking good.

The afternoon was spent helping Jenny with her Western Blot procedure; I actually got to make one of the sandwich things to transfer from the gel plate to the membrane. This was pretty cool and I expect to take full credit when Jenny finds something groundbreaking as a result of my genius . Which as far as I could see went perfectly to plan. (see pictures)

I’m looking forward to tomorrow and using the ‘big boy’ microscope downstairs should be really cool. But most of all I cant wait till Friday when we get to see how the gene knockdowns have affected our batches of cells – the moment of truth.