summer placement

On Thursday I unfortunately could not go into the lab because I did not get clearance from occupational health, since the job involves working with flies I could not go in. I spent the day reading journals about border cell migration to catch up on the work they are doing and found them really interesting specially the fact that many genes have already been identified and are potential drug targets.

On Friday the group has a meeting to catch up on every body's work and get up to date as well as to offer suggestions and further improvements. It was a bit nerve racking because some information was very advanced for me although on the other hand it was amazing to be part of a real research group and to listen to every one else talk about their recent findings.

Friday morning I received my clearance to work on the lab and I was introduced to the technique of dissecting ovaries from drosophila flies. At the beginning it appeared quite daunting because you cannot see your hands and are only able to see through the microscope the tips of the scalpel and the fly. After hours of practice I felt really pleased to achieve dissecting intact ovaries from various flies.

I was also shown how to prepare my slides so I could view the slides under the fluorescence microscope. The slbo gene had been attached to green fluorescent protein and since this gene is only commonly  expressed in border cells it is possible to visualize them. My slides still need a lot of improvement but I was happy to realize that they were getting better progressively. 

my first two days

Yesterday I started my summer placement, first I was introduced to the project and what it involves. The project seems to have many parts and a lot of people working in various things but from what I have picked up so far they are using drosophila to knock out or over express some of the genes and look at the effects these produce. They are mainly concerned with the signalling patterns that are involved in border cell migration thus they over express or knock out kinases and phosphatases. Yesterday I helped to separate drosophila males from females I learnt how to identify them under the microscope and then separate them in order to prepare them for some crosses. 

Today in the morning I helped with some of the bioinformatics involved and I used BLAST to help identify and align some of the kinases. in the afternoon I was introduced to confocal microscopy and how to identify the normal cells in the different stages of developement from cells that had altered phenotypes because of the introduced changes in gene expression. I managed to identify some border cells that were delayed and some that had separated from the cluster. I think tomorrow I will be involved in disecting some egg chambers. So far so good. 

Adriana