#lab update

[thefroglab]

Working on a video for this electric typewriter

[thefroglab]

Up next, RFID experiments to see if I can get my NFC rings to do anything cool and magical

[thefroglab]

Dialing in the measurements on a cool bailsong model I found

[accidentallybiology]

//everything went better than expected

Turns out (as usual) people are not evil and they want to help you. My supervisor is a lovely French guy (who had to leave on holiday, but took the time to meet me and get me settled in) and while he’s away his PhD student is looking after me (and she is so patient, because she has to teach me how to do everything). 

They got me stuck in the lab straight away, which I’m glad for, because really that’s the stuff I need to get used to. Mostly making up buffers and stock solutions. But I transformed a HLA gene into some E coli and I’m working through an expression test to see which clone makes it the best. 

The whole group is working on developing vaccinations against cancer using DNA/RNA/proteins derived from common/known mutations. So cool. So glad I’m in this group (though when you’re working day to day it seems more disconnected from the final goal. Maybe this is because I’m still on the making buffers level of work). 

Socially... it’s super international here. I don’t know most of the countries people are from, but everyone is great. That’s in the lab and in the A//mgen cohort I’m part of. Need to recommend this program to everyone...

[vulturegeorge]

furiously fast flesh dissolving

I was in dissection class the other day (I know, awesome right?) and we were getting bored so I my teacher and I started about different methods for skeleton preparation, since it’s a hobby we share. I was explaining my basic maceration process when he told me how they do it at the veterinarian university; they use concentrated bleach to basically dissolve the meat. To demonstrate he dropped a rat head in the mixture and in 40min it was a skull.  Would have taken me weeks with usual maceration ><’ made me think of all us vultures, macerating stinky reads for months on end, emitting a huge *GROAN* After that they just pop it in some 3% hydrogen peroxyde for a while, and voilà! So anyways, i’ll be volunteering with this guy after the vacation and I get to dissect and articulate an entire cat!

WOO

[vulturegeorge]

Today was my second volunteer day at the anatomy prep lab

At first when the prof. told us we were going to dissect house and lab mice and compare the two, I thought : "how boring, more mice!". But it turned out to be really interesting to look at the anatomical differences between the two, just because we could. We got really lucky and my friend had a Situs inversus mouse, meaning all of its organs were on the opposite side of their normal position, the heart veins were even like this!

We also got to prepare the organs from last week's dissection for histology slides. We mounted them in paraffin and will be cutting them on the microtome next week. This was nice because I had only studied the procedure in books and now i'm learning how to do it for real.

The best part of all was when I voiced out my interest in participating in dissections of bigger animals, the prof offered to take my number and call me if they did a horse, cow or maybe you know lion or elephant because meh, it happens ^^ I was jumping up and down in my head :D

[superresolution]

This week's Australian Synchrotron User Meeting marked Donna's fifth consecutive attendance and Toby's first. Donna presented a talk debuting results from beamtime in August which combined SMLM and S-FTIR for the first time in order to examine both the structural and compositional makeup on single cells before and after fixation. The results went down well with a lot of positive feedback. The paper should be out soon! 

[twogirlsandsomemonkeys-blog]

Tools of the trade for weighing out samples at the CEST laboratory for isotope analysis. 

Clockwise from the top left:

Balance - to weigh out the samples

Ethanol - used to wipe down instruments between samples to prevent cross contamination 

Sample vials - containing tin foil wrapped monkey hair from the Gibraltar site

Wells - perfectly sized for the tin capsules to place samples in.

Calipers - used to measure of 2mm of hair for sampling

Various tweezers - helpful to fold up the capsules into little tiny balls

Brush - helps get rid of stray hairs in between samples

Hair sample - wrapped in tin foil, lined up root to tip

Tray - holds my samples so that I can identify them

Tin capsules - what the sample is put in before it is combusted in the mass spec.

More specific details about how we go about prepping samples before combusting them in a mass spectrometer coming soon! Hint: you need really good eyesight.

- Anne