In short, feel free to skip this post.
It all starts on Friday morning, 5:00 am. I mix cells so they will mate and shake them around for a half an hour so they'll all mate pretty much at the same time (yes, that's really how we do that). Then I monitor the cells for several hours. Most of the late morning and early afternoon is spent making control slides and continuing to monitor the mating. I get to go home at 5:00 pm for a bit of a nap. Then the real fun begins.
Picture it: Friday night, 9:00 pm. I open the incubator and am confronted with the solutions of mating cells I prepared eeeaaarrrllly that morning:
I add growth medium to one of the flasks:
Then I start taking samples from both flasks:
And put them in little tubes.
I put the tubes in the centrifuge and spin them so all the cells go down into the bottom:
Then I suck off all the fluid leaving a little ball of cells at the bottom of the tube.
Then I wash the cells with 3 different washes of methanol (mix up the cells in methanol, let them sit, spin the cells down and suck off the methanol, repeat, repeat):
And then I finally drop some concentrated cells onto slides which I will stain, photograph and digitally analyze later.
Repeat every two hours for eleventy million hours. (Oh, okay. Fourteen.) Then repeat every twelve hours for a week. Because this is how many slides I'm making:
I don't know right now. A lot.
And now I have to go make some more. Ta!!
_____
4 comments:
Perhaps oddly, I found this very interesting! Thank you for the "inside look."
Mating cells....at least somebody is getting...um, never mind!
I find all that science-y stuff fascinating! I had wanted a career in science, especially lab work, but then I took chemistry! Consequently, I changed my mind. Good luck with the rest of the slides and all.
How did you manage to stay awake all that time?? I can feel my eyes slamming shut just reading about it!
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