I spent most of my time working on my final project in the lab for these two weeks. As I mentioned earlier, I began working on a new project in Week 5. As we tried to print the HUVECs with pluronic that Thursday, we found out that the glass slide which was used to separate the gel from cell media always popped off when it was immersed in liquid solution. It is very important that the glass slide stays attached to the gel, which encaps the cell channels, because otherwise cells will be able to absorb media from the top instead of through the channels. My mentor was to start his break in Week 6, so he asked to me design a structure that would secure the glass slide in place in cell media. I came up with about ten ideas and eliminated seven of them after a discussion with my mentor and aother post-doc. Our expectation was to design something that was easy to work with but would fix the glass slide right in place. Throughout Week 6, I was mostly writing my codes - I was to print the entire structures in cell dishes using 3D printers- and printing my codes. Two of the designs turned out to be impractical or too time-consuming when it came to printing, so I eventually chose this idea, that is to add two clamp-like structures to fix the glass in place. I then tested out how thick and high should the constructs be and printed a bunch. The design turned out to be much simpler than I had expected.
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| A bad illustration of the design: the cells seeded in pluronic will be printed in between the two supporting filaments and beneath the glass slide. Then we will encap them with gel/fibrin and aspirate the pluronic when it liquefies. The cells are to grow and absorb media through the channel openings on the sides. |
I went to the lab during the weekend to check on my prints. Unfortunately the plastic containers melted because the temperature setting in the oven was altered, so I had to print again using a 3D printer that I had never used before (didn't get trained on XD). It took some time to change all the setting and codes but I figured them all out.
In Week 7 (which is this week) I took out my designs and checked their stability in water and DMEM complete. They worked well!
At the same time, we also checked out the cells' performance in the dishes that we printed on last Thursday. Cells in some of the dishes looked fine. We decided to seed more cells in the pluronic ink the next time we print so as to gain a higher cell density in the channels.
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| 2F-1_37C_PH10X_HUVEC Print Test |
By the way, I finally got swipe access to the labs and office on Monday. How ironic! I am leaving in four days.
All in all, I am spending my last week in the lab. It's been great experience; I learned a lot about science and also became much more independent by living on my own. I feel really fortunate to meet so many friendly scientists and interns -future scientists-. They were helpful and funny. I am truly grateful to the opportunity to work in the Lewis lab.
Peace and enjoy the rest of summer.
YZ
07/22/14
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