Deja Cunningham, Week 6, Wrapping up

It was pretty sentimental thinking about leaving Duke after this week. I learned how to do so much in the lab and I enjoyed exploring all the great places Durham has to offer. This week I had a little more free time during the day since there wasn’t much left for me to do so I took the opportunity to finish my EXP poster knowing that I would not want to do it when I got home. I even showed it to the other members of the lab when I was finished and they were amazed. One couldn’t believe that I was still a high school student.

On Monday, Elizabeth and I set up our plates for the vitamin D experiment. For the past 6 days, the bone marrow derived macrophages were sitting in the incubator in order to stimulate growth. Before we set up the plates on Monday, I looked at them under the microscope and they looked great! The standard concentration of cells in a plate is 1x10^-6 cells per mL. If the cells aren’t at that concentration, then you have to dilute them with PBS, which is what I did. First, I found the concentration of the macrophages. To do this, I put 10μm of the sample solution (macrophages + RMPI-MCSF) in a well and added 10 μm of trypan blue dye, which points out the dead cells when counting. In the lab, we use a hemocytometer under a microscope to count cells. It is a small device that contains a grid with different dimensions of squares. I used the 4X4 square. Based on the amount of cells in a square we can use it to find the total concentration after final calculations. In order to get my samples to be 1x10^-6 cells per mL, I needed to add 3mL of PBS to the sample. Once this was done, I put the samples into new wells. The next day we added a solution of vitamin D + ethanol to all the wells except the controls, in which we just added ethanol to. 

On Wednesday, I brought in cookies for the lab from Insomnia Cookies in Chapel Hill as a thank you and on Thursday, Elizabeth organized a goodbye breakfast/lab meeting for me where I presented for the last time on the data collected from the macrophages experiment. She got us all bagels from Einstein Bros Bagels in the children’s hospital. It was really nice talking with the members of the lab. 

On the last day I was finally able to successful complete another H&E staining on our lung samples. I took a few images of the finished product.

It’s been a great experience being at Duke and I can’t wait to see what the future beholds! Who knows maybe I’ll come back to the lab next summer!