Peddie EXP 2017

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...

Yul, Shawn, and I working in the tissue culture room Week 5 was the determining week for me; would we have enough cells to inject into the next two groups of mice or would I have to go back to Jersey with minimal data? Luckily, about five different sets of plates have been growing well and things are looking pretty optimistic. Throughout the week we continued to change the media in the plates and kept a close eye on them to make sure their growth was progressing. In the beginning of the week we noticed that one set of female cells from the 14th of June were growing too well. To stop the cells from growing too much to the point of overcrowding, Yul replated them and their numbers greatly decreased. We did this because the other cells were not growing as quickly since they were fresher than the cells from the 14th of June. Now, the number of cells in each plate, no matter what day they were plated, is pretty consistent. In addition to changing media, we have been testing behaviou...

Bowling with friends On the first day of week 3, Shawn and I changed media and did von Frey testing on the male mice. As usual, their pain threshold was higher than the female's and they were less fidgety. The following day, we sacrificed 10 more mice: 5 males and 5 females. We plated the bone marrow cells as we typically do and continued to change the media for all of the batches of cells. Shawn removing bone marrow using a syringe and tweezer The hood where we change media and plate cells  Additional image of female BMSCs plated on 6/14/17 Image taken on 6/30/17 of female BMSCs plated on 6/14/17 On the Wednesday of week 3, we made new media because we were running low. We put two antibiotics, penicillin and streptomycin, and fetal bovine serum (FBS) in the media. Though I knew why we put the antibiotics in the media, I did not know why we put FBS in. As it turns out, the FBS provides proteins that are necessa...

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...

View from my desk My first week at Duke has been exciting and informative. On the first day, I entered the Snyderman Genome Sciences Research Building 1 with chocolate and nerves. My grandmother is Italian and insisted that I come with gifts on the first day. The grad student I am working with, Mr. Yul Huh, told me not to be nervous and gave me a tour of the lab. It was all very overwhelming at first, but he made me feel comfortable. He told me that a student from Dartmouth started a week earlier than me and would be working with me in the lab. After lunch that day, Shawn, the student from Dartmouth, sent me a few primary articles that would be necessary to read because they are the foundation of my project. For the most part, Shawn and Yul are the ones I go to if I need help or don't understand something because there is somewhat of a language barrier in my lab. However, there are a few other labs next to us that are doing similar pain research, so I could go to them as well....