Gaining independence

After yesterday's demonstrations of immunostaining and slides preparations, I earned enough trust to be allowed to apply the secondary antibodies and mount the cells on a slide completely on my own. I see myself gaining more and more confidence in the techniques I would often need throughout the placement. However, Sangeeta said that if there was any method I would especially like to practise, we can come up with an additional experiment so I can gain extra skills. Which means that I might do my first ever Western blot at some point.

Lab work always involves a lot of waiting, caused by washing, incubations, staining, drying or defrosting. I spend my breaks practising handling coverslips, very fragile and used a lot. So far the breaks have been long enough so that I improved a lot in picking coverslips and even managed to turn them around. Obviously, when there are delicate cells residing on them, there is more pressure, but I must believe that practice makes perfect.

There was also a lot of fluorescent microscopy today. First I observed my results and because of higher magnifcations not working they would probably have to wait for confocal microscopy to poduce better data. However, I have put my first conclusions in my lab notebook.
Afterwards Sangeeta put me in charge of the first part of life imaging of her experiment. I am really gaining independence and self-confidence! I also find my way around the lab and department much easier now than on Monday - clearly I am setlling down. Which sounds good, seeing myself spending there the next six weeks. They should be really interesting and we had a productive discussion about the plans and projects with Sangeeta today.

Tomorrow we are going to move from neurons to fibroblasts. The difference is quite big. Hopefully I will adjust quickly and will be able to fill my notebook with more experiments!