It is week three and I feel very independent in the lab. I often ask the grad student Diana for help on specifics but for most of the time this week I came in, completed my reactions, ran the gel, and went home. This week I had to prepare eluted DNA from rat samples.
On Monday I went with two grad students, Diana and Chenxu, to the floor where animals are kept. There are multiple rooms, each accessible with special key cards. Before entering the floor we had to wear scrubs and special foot covers. The floor houses rats, mice, zebra-fish, and even Mexican axolotl for research. We only needed to extract the lymph node and spleen DNA from one rat. The lymph node and spleen are where the most T cells are located. In order to perform the dissection, I had to witness the death of a rat. We put a female rat, supplied by a neighboring rat, in a Carbon Dioxide chamber and later dissected the rat for its T Cell heavy organs.
After taking out the organs we used specific buffers to isolate the RNA from the samples. On Tuesday I performed RT- PCR to isolate DNA from the samples. Then, on Wednesday I performed my first rat PCR reaction with primers supplied by Dr. Deo. Thursday was my final day before the ling weekend and I completed a nested PCR reaction and gel purification. Sadly the bands on the second PCR's gel were unclear so I will have to repeat the reaction on Monday.
I find my lab work especially interesting because I get to see how DNA is isolated, treated, and analyzed from live animal to DNA sequence. Once I clone the alpha and beta rat samples, I will have contributed some data to my lab.
No comments:
Post a Comment