Just Another Day in the Lab

Summer Research Program

Each summer we get rising second year medical students in the labs. This program is grant funded and gives the medical students a chance to see what it's like to work in a biomedical research laboratory for 6 weeks. Each lab acquires medical students through a matching lottery. This summer, we were matched with a male student with a background in Chemistry. He started in the lab today.

PPE

The first thing we needed to do was pick out a lab coat for him to wear. In the research lab, it is very important to have the proper personal protective equipment. It's also important that this equipment fit so that we are comfortable as we work. This medical student is very tall, but we managed to find a coat that fit in our surplus of lab coats.

Learning to be comfortable with a pipettor

Now on to more fun activities. For someone that doesn't use a pipettor on a regular basis, practicing is important. There are several types of pipettors that we use in the lab. A serological pipettor is used for pipetting milliliters of volume from 1mL to a little over 50mL depending on the pipette size used. There are single channel micropipettors that pipette small amounts of liquid. The P1000 will allow you to pipette between 100-1000 microliters (µL). The P200 is for 20-200uL. And last but not least is the P10 that will dispense half a microliter with a range of 0.5-10uL. There is also the multichannel pipettor that allows the researcher to pipette liquid into a multi-well plate.

Liquid nitrogen storage

This afternoon we thawed some leukemia cells for the student's summer project. These cells are frozen at -320 degrees Fahrenheit (-196°C) in a liquid nitrogen storage container. We will need to let the cells proliferate for about two weeks before using them for an experiment. For the time being, I already have some cells growing in a flask in the incubator for the student to practice with. I'll share more about this project in a later post.

All images above were taken with my LG VELVET Smartphone. I've dropped it so many times that the camera is no longer taking crisp clear pictures. Sorry for the poor quality images. I am getting a new phone soon so I can continue to share my crazy lab life :)

THANK YOU for visiting my blog 😇 Peace!

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay