Michael King - Week 1 - Loh Lab UCSF

I just finished my first week at Dr. Loh's lab and it has been great! Everyone at the lab is very friendly, and the post doc that I am working with, Dr. Ernesto Diaz-Flores, is a great guy. There is also another high school student volunteering at the lab over the summer who is a rising senior that lives in San Francisco. Since UCSF does not have an undergraduate program, everyone here is at least a graduate student, and some have already finished medical school and have patients to see, too. The lab is only a short walk from where I am staying, and the hours are relatively lenient from around 9:30 to 5.  Haven't had much time to explore San Francisco yet but the weather has been pretty nice this week, although it has been a bit cooler than what I expected.

This week in the lab I learned how to take care of cell cultures, including how to start a cell culture, change the medium, and test for viability. The cell lines that we culture are stored in small vials in a liquid nitrogen container, which is a pretty hefty machine and, if I remember correctly, chills the samples down to negative 170 degrees, Celsius of course. Cultures have to be worked with under a hood to keep them sterile and we constantly have to spray equipment and our gloves with ethanol to prevent contamination. There are a bunch of complicated machines and I've only learned what a few do, namely the one that tests for cell viability, which I have been using almost everyday. Some pipetting techniques I learned in biotech have been useful at times, and one of the post docs extracted DNA from bacteria much like we did for DSAP last winter. The cultures we grew were then tested by exposing the different cell lines to a experimental drug. To test the effectiveness of the drug we used a machine that measured levels of ATP, which directly correlates to the number of cells in each sample. 

Dr. Diaz-Flores has been running a small in vivo experiment with mice at a separate facility by injecting them with ALL cancer cells and seeing how they respond to experimental therapy. The mice have no immune system, so human leukemia cells can engraft within the mice's bodies. I will soon have to handle mice, too, as soon as I get my special training for working with animals. To determine the effectiveness of treatment, a machine called a flow cytometer is used, which is able to count and distinguish between mouse blood cells and the human leukemia cells. By measuring the levels of leukemia cells left in the mice each day after treatment, we can determine how effective the drug is against this specific type of cancer.

The lab has been really fun so far and I am learning a lot about leukemia and lab techniques. I am looking forward to next week and hopefully I will be at least okay at handling the mice. I will also remember to get some cool pictures next week.