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| Me and Deja in front of the chapel |
My last week in the lab seemed rather long, but it was a memorable one. We changed media on Monday, as usual. and did some behaviour testing. Tuesday was the same, except my lab threw me a little going away party. The conference room table was filled with the most Chinese food I have ever seen and they gave me a gift at the end. After lunch, we checked the status of our cells to make sure we would have enough to inject on Thursday. As we expected, our cells were growing very well and they were ready to be extracted and injected- we had to wait until Thursday because Yul was very busy helping people out in other labs. On Wednesday we sacrificed 10 more female mice just in case we did not have enough cells for the injections of group 3 and 4. Like before, we extracted their bone marrow and plated the cells. Thursday morning was pretty slow and uneventful. In the afternoon, Yul prepared male and female cells for injection. The male and female BMSCs were separately scraped off the bottom of the wells and added to new media. The cells were then washed with PBS 3 times and centrifuged for 5 minutes 2 times each. The cells were washed 3 times to make sure that only BMSCs were leftover in the tube once the supernatant was extracted. Because Yul is not as experienced as others in the lab, another member of the lab injected the groups with the desired cells. On Friday, Yul took me and Shawn out for Korean BBQ for my last meal. After lunch, we went back to the lab and tested the groups of mice. The first group (males with male BMSC injection) showed positive results; the frequency that they felt pain decreased almost back to baseline. The second group (males with PBS injection) showed no relief as expected because they were not given BMSCs. The third group (females with female BMSC injection) also showed no relief because the pain in female mice does not decrease with male or female BMSC injections. The fourth group (females with PBS injection) showed no relief as well. All of these results are very positive because it supports the fact proven last year in my lab that only male mice treated with male BMSCs show relief. Unfortunately, I will not be able to be in the lab to test our major hypothesis (to see if BMSCs have analgesic effects/stop pain before it happens if injected throughout the course of chemotherapy), but I hope to get the results from Shawn because he stays in the lab for 2 more weeks.
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Previous results show that male BMSCs have analgesic effects on male mice
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| Mice are given paclitaxel injections on days 1, 3, 5, and 7, then receive BMSC injection on day 10 |
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Males (left) injected with male BMSCs- relief; males (right) injected with female BMSCs- no relief
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| Females (left) injected with male BMSCs- no relief; females (right) injected with female BMSCs- no relief |
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Our results: Male baseline for threshold is higher than female baseline and their frequency increases after PTX injections, while their threshold decreases (one outlier)
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Baseline female threshold is lower than the male's and they experience more pain than males- supported by the fact that their threshold is much lower and their frequency is much higher
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| Visited Luray Caverns in VA on my way back to Jersey |
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| Korean BBQ |
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