I rode the bus down to the lab and arrived at 10 am. I went up to the eleventh floor of Drexel University's New College Building a met up with Charles. I had to review all my notes because today Charles was going to quiz me on ELISA, gradient purification, and fixing viruses. I still ended up taking a lot of notes. Then we went to the "hood" (which is a special machines that uses the powers of wind to force anything that could contaminate our samples out of the "hood" and into our regular air). Once we got to the "hood" we began virus fixation.
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| This is a "hood", but isn't the one in our lab because I couldn't get a nice angle. This image does the "hood" justice though. |
What does it mean to fix a virus (not be cause it is broken)? In order to make it stay put and not run wild and attach to things that wouldn't aid in our experiments it is important to fix the virus.
We added buffer solution to the virus in order to immobilize it so that when it is put on a plate for the next experiment it won't be able to move and block potential binding sites. It is most important for the next experiment that epitopes (highly specific binding sites for antibodies) be readily accessible.
After the viruses were fixed we put them on the super sticky ELISA plates which have 96 wells and put those plates in the 4 degree C freezer overnight.
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| ELISA Plate: ELISA stands for Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay |
...Since the lab went to a conference in Florida and then Charles went to the Philippines for vacation I took a four
week break following this week.
-Jada
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