Week 3

This week we had a large takedown. We had to kill 20 mice and remove their spleens, bone marrow, and other organs. My job was to take the removed spleens and smash them in ACK extracting white blood cells while killing red blood cells. We then had to dilute and stain the extracted cells and count them. Other than that the week was just helping whoever out here or there. I also learned to kill red blood cells with water by making a hypotonic solution so that they would take in so much water they would explode.

2nd Week

The second week was much busier. I did a lot of different things in many different areas of the lab. TBRC is divided in to three different groups small animal, large animal, and human studies. I've been working under people in the small animal lab. The lab has two goals: decrease the percentages of chronic rejections in transplants; and use graft vs. host disease to fight cancer. Both goals rely heavily on the study of immunology and bone marrow transplants in paticular. Some of the work I've been doing is harvesting spleens and extracting cells from them, running PCRs, and other basic labwork whenever help is needed.

1st week

I started my internship this week. It was a pretty slow start the first couple days until I finished orientation. One of the things I did this week was extract bone marrow from mice. I also learned about flow cytometry, and it's uses in quantifying molecules.