Night experience and the first experiment

I spent two nights visiting the lab every 4 hours - at 10pm, 2am and 6am on Monday/Tuesday night and 10pm and 2am on Tuesday/Wednesday, helping with fixing the cells from Becky's time-lapse experiment. It turned out to be really useful, because I actually got to fix the neurons before I had to do the same with the cells for my experiment.

Yesterday I got a day off to read the review and get some rest after the night lab work. Today I started with planning the course of the experiment with Sangeeta. An actual, real experiment, with controls and duplicates. Before starting I got essential practice with handling coverslips in the non-cellular environment, not to risk any losses (it would be really sad to lose the neurons that looked really good under the microscope). After a few trials I got enough confidence. Meanwhile I got familiarised to the kit used for extracting plasmids from bacteria by Becky (which wasn't too bad, as I remembered doing that a few years ago in Warsaw, during my first lab experience).

Then the time came for my first experimental set-up. Everything had to be sterile, under the hood. Despite a few initial struggles with coverslips with cells, I managed to put everything right for incubation, so that after lunch I could fix them, just as I learned at nights.

After fixing I prepared some of the neurons for immunocytochemistry (another theoretical module, Cellular&Molecular Imaging, brought into life!) and Sangeeta showed me how to prepare the slides for fluorescent microscopy. Which meant that on the same day I could still observe the initial outcomes of my first experiment! So far they look promising, but I should know more tomorrow, after confocal microscopy.

Before looking at my slide, I also got introduced to the fluorescent microscope in the labs. I know I'll use it a lot over the next weeks and it doesn't look that scary, operating it shouldn't be a big trouble. However, Sangeeta promised I would get more practice tomorrow morning.

Today was also Becky's last day in the laboratory, so from tomorrow on it's going to be only Sangeeta and me. It means there might not be somebody to lead me through anymore, but on the other hand it means I'll have to get independent and self-confident quicker, which isn't bad at all.