Michael King - Week 3 - Loh Lab UCSF

This last week was a lot more of the same, but I also did learn a few new things. Unfortunately we have been dealing with quite a few contaminations of our cell cultures, although we haven't really identified the origin of this problem. I guess I will take this entry to explain my lab project slightly more in depth, and what exactly we use the cultures for. An important use for the cell cultures is the cell titer glow assay, which allows us to determine the efficacy of two experimental drugs, which target separate specific proteins in the cancerous cell lines. They are called BCL-2 and BCL-XL, and cells resistant to the drug and cells responsive to the experimental drugs have different protein expression patterns. The goal of these experiments is to determine a protein expression pattern that would indicate the specific drug would be useful in treating the cancer. To determine the protein expression patterns, I learned about a new technique, western blotting.

Western blotting involves first isolating proteins from lysed cells, running them on a gel to separate them based on size, and marking the proteins in question with antibodies. The final result is an image with bands of varying darkness, indicating the expression level of a specific protein. Western blots are quite a long process, and the procedure has turned out to be one of the harder techniques I have learned at the lab, with significant room for error.

Right now my post doc trusts me to take care of the cell cultures relatively independently. It certainly can be time consuming when you have a large number of cell cultures growing, as the media needs to be changed every other day, and viability is tested for almost everyday.

Last week a patient sample also arrived from a leukemia patient, and my lab was able to collect a large number of leukemia cells which were cryopreserved and have been preserved for future experiments. I also attended my first lab meeting, which was certainly not easy to follow, but I think I was able to understand a fair part of the presentation.

Interestingly enough I also attended the no hitter Giants game last week, but since I'm not the biggest baseball fan and I have to admit I wasn't following the game too intently, I didn't realize what was happening until someone else told me what was at stake in around the 7th inning. He had to write it out for me because apparently saying the words out loud might jinx the opportunity. Wimbledon also started last week I believe.