My turn again eh? I really can’t believe it’s been over 2 months since the last blog post I did. The time has really flown by, with all the experiments blurring into one and every paper I read just starting to jumble around in my head like alphabet soup. The funder’s meeting came and went, and now we’re all working on our 9 month early stage reviews, something I’m sure the other Stratigrad students are looking forward to as much as I am…
I’m spending more and more time over at the IRDB building at Hammersmith Hospital, where I’ve been carrying out all of my tissue culture work. Trying to find a balance between the lab work (the fun part) and the litany of desk work I should really be getting on with (the not so fun part) is becoming difficult. If I had my way I would probably spend all my time in the lab, and pay a trained monkey or an undergrad student (pretty much the same thing) to write up everything for me. I’ve been reliably informed that this is not possible.
On a recent visit back home, some friends were asking what I actually do in the lab. After attempting to explain it, the overall conclusion was that I am either working with Mako energy and Jenova cells, or I am personally engineering the zombie virus. For the latter I was asked “for them to be the slow sort of zombie if possible”. I’m not sure if this conversation was a reflection on my work not being interesting enough, or me needing less ridiculous friends. What I’ve actually been doing is treating colorectal cancer cells with different drug concentrations to see the effects on cell proliferation, and planning longer term experiments to see any changes in the metabolic profile, the genome and epigenome. This morning I’ve finished setting up a clonogenic assay for two of my cell lines, leaving me with 42 small petri dishes of cells and media which will now sit in the incubator for 10 days before I can actually see if the experiment has worked properly. High-octane science happening right here.
In the meantime I’m planning and hopefully starting some pharmacodynamic investigations using my cell lines and potentially a number of different drugs to see what effect they have on metabolic profile over a short time course. I’ve also been involved in meetings for how I’m going to assess the mutational status of my cell lines (should be using some pretty interesting technology for that) and trying to organise the acquisition of clinical samples to relate my cell line work to later on in my PhD. So lots of different things all happening at the same time, all moving a little slower than I would like, but all starting to show some progression which is pretty exciting – at least I think so.
I should probably get back to it. No way to predict how much will have happened and how much will have changed in the next two months. I’ll probably still have a beard though. Constants and variables.
Until next time,
Adam