today..................

Today I had a great day!!!!  I shadowed lovely Lauren, she is a PhD student in our research group and she works in live imaging. I knew live imaging was part of my proposal and I knew it was something I would have to do in my summer project,  but I didn’t give it a lot of thought and didn’t really realize what it was all about. I can say this is going to sound terribly stupid but I did not know that you image the cells when they are still alive!!!!!! I know I should have gotten a clue by the name live imaging hahha but I really didn’t. I think I just didn’t think about it much, and I thought that live imaging was just a lot of images together taken from different slides and then made a movie hahhah sort of what it really is but I cannot believe is the same egg chamber that you are looking at and that all of those pictures come from the same border cell migrating towards the oocyte I can say that today I  actually saw live cells moving!!!

As soon as I came into the lab I was assigned to work with Lauren and she explained me how to prepare the media for the cells, she showed me what you had to add to the media so that the cells think they are still in their cosy natural environment!!!! And so that they stay alive!!!! She allowed me to help her adding the aminoacids and antibiotics and she let me do things on my own with her supervision which was brilliant nerve racking and challenging!!!!!  We first prepared the media and then went to the prep room to adjust the pH to 7 which she also allowed me to do myself !!!  in the prep room something really cool happened as well, there was another PhD student working there  with liquid nitrogen. I have read the words liquid nitrogen many times (x ray crystallography lectures........) but I had never seen actual liquid nitrogen it was amazing!!!!!!!!!

 Never mind back to the topic having prepared the media  we went into the fly lab to dissect the ovaries which has to be done extremely carefully so that they don’t die, and afterwards we headed to the confocal microscope to do the live imaging. I had worked a bit with this microscope before but doing it in real time is so different and just amazing to me!!!! I know that’s as geeky as you can get but I’m not going to lie I was thrilled!!  I just really wanted those border cells to move!!!!!!

With live imaging you can actually spot when and where a defect in migration takes place but for today we stuck with wild type cells to visualize normal migration patterns first.

 I really enjoyed my day plus I learnt a lot about how the microscope works, how to set it up, how to use it wow loved it!!!!

Xxxx