Day 1-
My first experience with Dr.
Bogler was impressive. Andrea and I met
in his office where he asked us about this course and if we had anything
special we wanted to do. I wasn’t too
sure what I wanted to do, so he continued with telling us about a four-day lab
that he had planned after briefly going though the background of the lab and
information on brain tumors we should know.
The background helped immensely because I had done so research of my own
but had gotten confused with all the terms, but he made everything clear. Then we went on a tour of the lab we would
be working on. It was laid out with
three corridors separating offices and rows of U-shaped lab bays. We also met some of the people who would be
helping us with the machines we needed to use.
The lab itself was a strange environment, proliferated with expensive
equipment, the simple stocks of our chemistry lab, and everyone walking around
in white lab coats. As we left he took
down our e-mail addresses so that he could keep in touch to answer questions,
which I was sure I would have because I would never be able to remember the
great overview he gave us, and get us the schedule for our lab.
Day 2-
I walked into Henry Ford Hospital
eager to begin the lab, and immensely frustrated at the ¾ of an hour early we
arrived. When 9:00 finally arrived we
went to Dr. Bogler’s office and he introduced us to Apple, the person who would
show us how to use the micro dissector, who told us we needed to douse our
slides in xylene and wait an hour for them to dry. While they were drying Dr. Bogler had Lisa show us graphs off the
CEQ2000XL, which was the machine needed for our final step in the lab. Then our slides were ready to be micro
dissected. Thus began our tedious task
of the day, we placed a slide under the machine, which was a microscope with a
laser attached and pushed a little red button 1000 times to pulse the laser
enough times to capture adequate cells for PCR. This was repeated in three different spots on each slide and took
most of the day, it was fun while I pushed the button, and provided a great
time for mediation on life while Andrea was working. The neatest part of the day was that we got to wear white lab
coats and look like real scientists.
All in all, the first day in the lab was a great introduction to the
often not so glamorous, but necessary work of the lab.
Day 3-
Our second day in the lab was
quite different from the first. As soon
as Lisa got back from lunch we got started on preparing our samples for
PCR. It was fun because we got to use
their fancy eppendorf pipettes to measure the chemicals we mixing. As we did this we had to change the tip of
the pipettes every time we used a new chemical or a new sample, this generated
an amazing amount of waste. To save some
time we were able to use a neat programmable machine that could fill twelve
wells at once, but to keep you hand still for the second it took was a grueling
test of nerves. After about two and a
half hours of work we were done filling our wells for PCR. Then we took the tray to a fancy centrifuge
which could spin the whole tray while keeping it cool, and not spill anything
because the hinges swung out keeping the liquid in place perpendicular to the
ground. Once that was done, all we had
to do was cover the tray with sticky aluminum foil and put it in the PCR
incubator so that the enzymes could do their work. Before we left Lisa took us into the cold room which was a nice
break from the slightly hot lab, a stark contrast to the ninety-degree day we
had to meet outside.
Day 4-
We
started our last day in the lab in our now familiar manner of going up the
elevator to Dr. Bogler’s office, having him lead us to the lab, get our lab
coats on, and have Lisa show us what we need to do for the day. Our first task was to prepare a plate for
electrophoresis. It was a great relief
to me that she pulled out a 96 well plate instead of a 384 well plate like the
one we used for PCR. The filling didn’t
take long because we only had to add a few ingredients to the wells, then we
could us the fancy multi-well pipette for the transfer of our DNA from the PCR
plate to the new one. Once the plate
was filled, Andrea and Lisa went to spin the plate, and I had to enter all the
samples into the computer grid. That
took about five minutes, then when Dr. Bogler came up to save the data, he saw
I had entered the wrong chromosome for half the samples and I had to change it
very quickly, which wasn’t fun at all.
Then we loaded up the machine and were done for the day. It was a nice quick day and all that was
left was for the machine to run the samples, and it would be done at 8:30PM
when all of us would be gone. The whole
lab experience was fun, and a nice way for me to experience a possible
career. I’m looking forward to Tuesday
when Dr. Bogler is going to go over our data with us and we can see how our lab
turned our.
Day 5-
I was
excited, though slightly tired, when entering the lab at nine today to analyze
our data. We were greeted by Dr.
Bogler, once he finished some more pressing work, who took us into the lab
while telling us that our data didn’t turn out that well, but “That’s
research.” We did spend about three
hours picking through the runs that did work, so it was kind of nice we didn’t
have to do a ton more. After we had
recorded all the useable data, Dr. Bogler came back to see our results. He looked over them and showed us the
equation to find LOH and let us crunch numbers for a while. After we were done with that he gave us some
slides and pictures for us to use in our presentation and answering some
questions we had. When we let after
this last day, I’d have many fun days in the lab, some good answers to
question, and some data processes and slides to present. A great experience overall.