A brief review of your research activities for the week:
This week I continued work on my project. I worked with another lab member to start a HeLa cell line, as these are the cells we will be using in the project. We got the cells from the Med Center nearby. We put them in plates with media, then put them in the incubator and gave them time to grow. In the following days, we split the cells into two different plates so they had more room to grow. We gave these plates fresh media and put them back into the incubator. The day after that, the cells were transfected with mScarlet and mTurquoise (two types of fluorescent proteins). We had a plate with cells transfected with both mScarlet and mTurquoise, a plate transfected with just mScarlet, and a plate transfected with just mTurquoise. The day after the cells were transfected, we attempted to image them using the FLIM microscope in the Med Center.
What tasks or goals did you accomplish? What do you still plan to accomplish?
I got to do a lot of hands-on work in the lab this week, which was really fun. I’m really excited to continue working on this different experiment – even though it is not what I originally thought I was going to be doing, it’s really interesting and I’m glad to have the chance to do it.
What challenges, if any, did you face this week and what steps did you take to overcome those challenges?
My experiment kind of changed from what it originally was since the ITC machine that I was originally going to use broke. Since this machine might not be fixed for another couple of months, my experiment has changed focus. The focus of this new experiment is to track viral RNA using Riboglow, a technique already established by the lab to track RNA in live cells. We are planning on comparing our results to an experiment that has already been done using a different method of tracking the viral RNA.