Kabir Grewal, Week 6.5, UPitt Lab
This past week was my last in the lab. In the middle of last week, I continued to work on immunofluorescent staining. This took a couple days to finish because the antibodies need to be left on the staining slide overnight. I added 2 more antibodies: DAPI which stains for nuclei, and another general stem cell marker called CD271. When I originally observed the stem cells under the confocal microscope, I did not see what I was expecting to; instead, I saw blurry colors that were not vibrant at all. This made me quite nervous because this is essentially what I had been working towards for the better part of six and a half weeks. After looking at the stained cells under a regular microscope, we discovered that in each of the 8 slides, the cells had grown primarily around the outside of the slides and sparsely in the middle region. With this new knowledge, plus the help of Dr. Du, we were able to take some great pictures, some of which are show...