On Monday, our 8-week-old CD-1 wild type male mice were delivered and Yul walked in with a big idea. Though we already knew what our focus was for the summer, Yul surprised us with a modified plan. Instead of giving mice the bone marrow stromal cells on day 7 after four treatments of the chemotherapy drug, we will be delivering the cells before and during the treatment. This is really significant because we can potentially stop the pain before it happens. This relates to pretty much any procedure regarding humans because most patients feel some type of pain afterward. Although we got our mice, our lab was not quite ready to do behaviour testing on them, so we decided to further test the female mice. We have been repeating the von Frey test on the female mice quite frequently because Shawn and I are new to this and we would like to decrease the standard error in our results. So far, the gap in the averages regarding the von Frey test has been decreasing and our results are becoming more and more accurate. Once again, we checked on our cultures and changed the media so our cells would not die. Since the specific cells we are trying to culture, bone marrow stromal cells, make up about one percent of all the cells in the bone marrow, it is a longer process to culture the cells. Fortunately, our female cells have been thriving and replicating.
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| von Frey values for up-down test |
Tuesday was exactly like Monday in the sense that we did the same thing: tested the female mice and changed the media in the cultures. On Wednesday, Dr. Venanzi came to my lab at 1 p.m. to see how I was doing. Thankfully, she brought donuts and our lab was very happy because some of us did not eat breakfast. I gave Dr. Venanzi a tour of my lab and showed her some of the behaviour testing I do. I wish I could have showed her how I dissect the mice, but I understand that it is very gruesome and not for everyone. After Dr. Venanzi left, Shawn and I finally got to test the mice. As expected, their threshold for pain was higher than the female's threshold. Because we are still in the process of getting our standard errors closer together, I cannot say for sure how much higher their threshold is. Next, Shawn and I dissected five male mice; this time, we each got to dissect two mice because Yul decided that our techniques and accuracy improved. Then, after all 20 bones were removed, we brought them to the tissue culture room. Once again, Shawn and I were trusted more to execute the culturing task. To take the bone marrow out of the bones, the tips have to be cut off so a needle can easily be placed in the bone. The process of taking out the bone marrow is a little long, but in short, we filled a syringe up with media and flushed out the bone marrow using the same syringe. After mixing up the media containing the bone marrow so the cells could be uniform throughout, the media was plated into 9 petri dishes. Because we wanted to isolate the bone marrow stromal cells from the other cells, we took out the media and replaced it. At first this may seem odd because one may think that the bone marrow stromal cells would be taken out as well, but they are very adherent to the plastic petri dishes and remain in the dishes while the other cells are removed. The following days were similar to almost any other day- we tested the mice, this time the males, and changed the media in both the male and female petri dishes. Next week, I will have pictures of the culture room and the cells that we have been culturing.
Though I am having a lot of fun in the lab, Deja, Shawn, and I are continuing to find things to do outside of the lab. On Wednesday, Dr. Venanzi, her mother, and daughter, took us (me, Will, and Deja) out to dinner at a place called Mothers and Sons Trattoria in downtown Durham. We all ate a lot of food and were filled by the end of the day. On Friday, we picked Shawn up from his hotel and watched a movie and a track meet. Saturday, Deja and I visited Elon University and had a wonderful tour... but what happened after the tour was amazing. Deja, her mom, and I all had the most delicious tacos in the world from a place called Tangent; the shrimp melt tacos were, in my opinion, the best. I think we would both go to Elon just for the tacos. Later that night, Shawn came over and we watched television and played video games- let me just say we will not be playing Wii with Shawn again because he somehow hacks it to beat us all the time.
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| Blue Devil dinner |
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| Elon University with Deja |
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