When I first arrived, we started growing the GDPD6 over-expressed cells. We (my mentor and I) changed the media every other day, and checked on the cells everyday. Things were going fine. We were even able to split the cells a week and a half ago as well as on Friday. The cells seemed to be thriving and we were even going to start treatment soon enough. But, when I went to check on the cells Monday, they didn't look good. The media they were suspended in was cloudy and you couldn't see the cells properly under the microscope. The cells somehow died over the weekend. We confirmed the cells were dead with two other people and both of them said that it seemed like there was a bacterial infection. Unfortunately, we had to trash the cells; one month of work down the drain.
After we figured out why the cells died, we began to try to figure out how and where the bacterial infection even started. We checked everyone's cells, threw away our media in case they were contaminated (even though we started using new media Friday). We cleaned the hood and the incubator we were using with 70% ethanol as well. We felt it was still not enough, and the lab technician cleaned the incubator with a solution specific for incubators. It turned out, someone spilled media in the incubator and didn't clean it, thus causing a bacterial infection. I have plans to start over Friday, but to save time, I will be growing parental, empty-vector, and over-expression at the same time. Hopefully, these cells grow faster so I can start treating the cells. Other than that, I have been studying for the upcoming school year, but I still have a lot of work to do. I also have been doing a bit of traveling, which was fun. I will try to update the blog next week to check on the progress, but this is my vacation so the update might be postponed just because of my laziness. :)
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AuthorShubhangy Raghavan Archives
January 2019
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