Kirsty the Scientist

Today is my last day working in the lab and it feels very bittersweet!   Over the past 10 weeks, I've had the best time.  A huge part of that was down to working in the most amazing group of people. Not only showing me the ropes of lab work, but welcoming me into their team with open arms. I also had the opportunity to learn from a fantastic supervisor - someone who really knows what they are doing and guides you under their wing whilst allowing you to explore and develop your own ideas.  So, although I'm really looking forward to the next stage - getting my dissertation written up and tying all my story together - I'm going to really miss working in the lab every day. This experience has completely changed my perspective about lab life. I'd never realised just how collaborative, supportive and friendly the environment can be (if you work with a good bunch!). And I enjoyed lab work more than I thought too - I loved problem solving at the lab bench, considering differ...

"You're not a real scientist until you've spent 3 weeks working hard on something and at the end of it all you might as well have been at home in your pyjamas the whole time!"  Unfortunately this week has ended up being a bit of a write off (which is incredibly frustrating in such a short 10 week project!). My Western blots (the experiment used to detect the presence of specific proteins) have all not been working and we've been really stuck as to exactly why. But maybe I'll just have to except sometimes science doesn't work when we want it to! 

Today was the first research group seminar since my group and the three other linked groups move labs. It was a really inspiring hour, with talks from three students at different stages of their PhDs, talking about their findings and results so far and their hopes and aims for their project. Each speaker had quite a different subject area which made the talks interesting and varied.  I definitely picked up a few tips for my presentation at the end of my project!

Working in a research lab for my dissertation project has definitely changed my perceptions of what working in science and research is actually like. Maybe I've just been part of a good group, but this whole experience has been so much more sociable than I'd expected. Science is quite a collaborative subject so there is always open discussion on what people are working on, but everyone has been so welcoming and inclusive that I've felt like a member of the team from day 1.  But lab life can be really tiring - you need to be on the ball all the time, keeping tabs on everything that's going on and  thinking ahead to the next step. 

As I was talking about earlier this week, I've often been running more than one experiment at the same time during a week. But today, the differences between the two experiments seemed quite striking!  The two experiments are to look for two different indicators to suggest that my protein of interest is involved in making my cell type increase during cell stress/inflammation:  1. Look for the protein itself. This involves separating the proteins using electrophoresis (pulling the proteins through a polyacrylamide gel using an electric current to draw the proteins through the tiny pores of the bell - the smaller proteins get to the bottom of the gel quicker as they can wiggle through the holes faster. Then using a method called Wet Transfer, which pulls the protein out of the gel and onto a PVDF membrane - a technique that uses litres of buffer.  2. Looking for the genes that are expressed - suggesting that the cell is producing the proteins and using the part of the...

Forget everything I've said about being busy so far - today was the most hectic and experiment-filled day I've had yet!  There was a lot to get done today - finishing off longer experiments from last week, plating out cells ready for this week's experiments, data analysis of a couple of different experiments - all on top of a Masters student, who is still shadowing me, following my every move and asking questions about each step. All good multi-tasking practice, and reminding me why each step is important, but I had to be on the ball at all times! 

This week I have really felt like part of a community. Maybe it's been the number of social events recently, or the fact that I'm now getting to know everyone really well, but it is an absolutely lovely experience to feel like part of this team of researchers at all different stages of their careers and lives. And it makes the workplace such an enjoyable place to be - no matter how much work we're cramming into a day! In other news, I've been getting some really promising results so far (although I'll only be detecting and analysing this week's experiment results next Monday as I was looking at a longer timecourse this week). So I'm actually starting to look forward to writing up some results and discussion on what I've found out so far! As I'm now about halfway through my project, aiming to get some writing done this weekend and next week and to make sure I take some of the pressure off the end of the project! I also got a surprise twitter sh...

This morning was the first day the new MRes students joined our research team - one of which will be directly following and continuing on the findings of my project - leaving me the best person to show him around and teach him the ropes!  Teaching someone else is definitely a very effective test in finding out what you know yourself, especially when some of the work has been new to me too! Luckily, I felt pretty confident in lots of the techniques I've been working on and I enjoyed the chance to teach and discuss my project with someone with a little bit less experience than me (said in the nicest way possible!). It also showed me ho much I have learnt in such a short space of time! 

Today felt like a really productive day, despite all the lab work actually being very repetitive!  Got all the figures from the previous results looking really good today and sent them off to my supervisor to be looked over. And stimulate the cells at multiple timepoints across today, and made up the samples, ready for this week's experiments!  Busy, busy, busy! Definitely, eat, sleep, lab at the moment!

Similar to yesterday, (and most days nowadays!) I was working on two goals:  1. Prep more cells for use for a new experiment for this week.  2. Detect the secondary antibody signals using the Western blots using two slightly different methods (which I can compare to see which is better). Li-Cor detects the signals using fluorescence using a shiny new machine the institute has; whereas ECL is the standard method which uses light.  We also had our first full group meeting today, where the research team gets together and we can discuss the results of everyone's experiments - which will now become a bit more of a regular occurrence! 

Still processing the information gathered from last week's experiments (results collected on Friday). Reprobing the Western blots with more antibody to compare the two proteins we're looking for.  Also learnt how to use an 'alternative Excel' today - called GraphPad Prism, which is a bit better than Excel for producing the lovely good-looking diagrams and graphs ready for publication and to pop in my dissertation.  All in all, these first results make a good start to the project, and has given a few more clues as to the direction this project is going to take over the next couple of weeks. 

This evening I came home and almost instantly fell asleep! It's been a busy week, and a lot of information to take in each day and new things to learn! And today's results were a little anti-climatic, with some contamination in one of the lanes of the western blot, and the PCR results still a bunch of numbers that I'll be compiling into a graph over the weekend before they make much sense! 

Another busy day, preparing the plates of cells to be tested in 2 different experiments - one to search for the protein itself and one looking for the DNA that makes the protein.  On the cusp of finding out the results of a week's worth of work, I was reminded of something I listened to in a podcast today. It was a quote from Richard Feynman, the renowned physicist: "The scientist has a lots of experience with ignorance, doubt and uncertainty., and this experience is of very great importance. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem they are ignorant, when they have a hunch as to what a result is they are uncertain, and when they are pretty darn sure of the result they are in doubt. Science is a satisfactory philosophy where doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed." "To paraphrase - s cience is the enemy of the certain and being shown to be wrong is an invaluable part of learning about nature." And that's something I will k...

Today was the busiest lab day I've had so far! We needed to be back and forth between the tissue culture lab and our normal lab/the office at regular intervals throughout the day to continue the timecourse. I'm stimulating the cells at lots of different times to find out at which point the protein I'm looking for is produced. 

After this whole debacle of the lab relocation, the hunt for the missing everything and the waiting around for each thing to be passed through all its initial checks and inductions; today was FINALLY the start of my first real experiment!   Using the plates prepped yesterday, this morning was a slightly earlier start in the tissue culture lab to serum starve the cells (which means they have a media containing all the nutrients and antibiotics they need to grow, but without the extra growth factors and signalling molecules (e.g. cytokines) that comes with the BSA, used in the enriched media they have been growing in up to this point). Then we waited most of the day to allow the serum starve to last as long as possible before starting the first timepoint of the experiment - inducing an inflammatory response in the cells with cytokines 24hrs before I assess the response the cells had and find out if they produced the protein I am looking for tomorrow. It's going to be a busy next fe...

Seeding cells is the process of taking the cells that have been happily growing in their flask full of everything they could ever need, and transferring them into a vessel that is much easier for experiments! This more useful container for cell experiments are know as 6-well and 96-well plates, basically a plastic tray containing 6 small or 96 tiny flat bottomed cylinders, which looks a little like this:  The cells were 'seeded' onto the plate, with a supply of culture medium, and left to grow overnight in an incubator. Tomorrow morning, hopefully all the cells will have stuck (adhered) to the base of the plates and will look under the microscope like the 'eye' shape instead of the perfectly round shape you see when they are lifted off the base with Trypsin so they can be transferred. 

A quiet Friday today, setting up all the computers in the new office space and giving them a quick clean. It was really nice to start to see the office coming together - it's just round the corner from the lab so it will now be so much easier to be productive whilst waiting for parts of experiments to finish.  We were also waiting today for the cells and our booking in the tissue culture lab to split the cells into 4 batches, giving the cells lots of room to grow over the weekend. 

Today was mostly a organisation day - working out the action plan for next week so we can squeeze in a full experiment and actually get some results for my project by the end of this week!  We also checked on the cells under the microscope to check they were growing OK and to change the culture medium (or cell food!) to a fresh batch. I could see the cells stuck to the base of the cell culture flask in their classic fibrous shape: (looks a bit like an eye) 

This morning we headed across town with a box of dry ice to collect the cells from the liquid nitrogen store. We took them back to tissue culture to be defrosted, resurrected and ready to grow over the next few days. Also finished off the Western blot today, so should get some good results from those tomorrow!  Although it's been less than a week so far, I'm really enjoying working with and getting on really well with everyone in my research group. Now we're actually getting on with some proper lab work, I'm so excited for the next few weeks! 

It is only when you see a lab being set up from nothing, sit through all of the compulsory talks and have induction tours around all the labs and workspaces that you realise how much work can go into creating, building and maintaining the labs we're working in. I always talk about how much I like the idea of working in a multi-faceted team and the interlinking roles that all of these people have when they come together in the workplace and I think today, more than any, reflected the importance of everyone doing their bit in the chain (and bothering to establish a strong foundation in the first place!).  Yes, at times it has been annoying that we still don't have any cells ready to use yet  and the lab work we're doing is still just filling in time.  (The cells are still being stored in liquid nitrogen at -170C, hopefully we'll resurrect them in the morning.)  But today showed me what an amazingly efficient lab and technical team can look like at its start and best ...