Instead of initially going to the lab, we went to the Mayo Clinic to have the cells irradiated. This time we irradiated the cells from the PC3 clonogenic assay that we prepared on Thursday. I had the opportunity to place the cells in the irradiator and see the machine in action.
Once we were back in the lab, I counted cells. As I mentioned before, this is tedious, and honestly the excitement of seeing cells or the way a sharpie looks under a microscope wears away after the first hour or so. Even though, there was still excitement to be found in this day because I was gathering my first piece of real data. (And by real data I mean data that we would not be throwing away, rather we would be analyzing it.)
Bellow are some photos of the equipment I used and the cell plate I counted. The first picture is a counter. The second is one of the cell plates counted. It has six wells and each well had to be counted individually.
Also, these are the final counts for each plate. It's a lot of number and columns I know, but don't stress (I mean not that you really were anyways) I'll provide an analysis of the data next time.
Nandini, this is really exciting! Can you explain a bit about what the irradiator is and how it works? What did you observe when you 'saw the machine in action'?
ReplyDelete