Aisha Kumar, Entry #2 Finally Getting Started!

Last week on Thursday i finally was able to complete my Lab safety training, so this week i was  finally able to start helping out around. One of the Post- docs in my lab, Amy, paired me with a graduate student, Mary-Carmen who taught me how to use the cryostat (in my last post) to cut the brain of a mouse in very thin slices.  I cut a few of my own pieces and put them on a slide.

this is one of the mouses that they were performing behavior tests on which i will work with next week after it is killed.

With the slides that i made, i performed staining, which involved tagging the organelles with different antibodies (a primary and a secondary) to make the smooth endothelial muscle visible, and pericytes in the brain of the mouse visible. The antibodies tag on to specific proteins, and make them light up  so when it is put under a florescent microscope, we can take images of them. These images will make the parts of the brain which we tagged light up. Hopefully i will see these images on Monday.

I also started helping Sam, a graduate student in my lab with cell culturing. I took cells which were confluent and placed them in a new media. These cells were human endothelial cells which will later be used for testing different drugs on to increase the expression of PICALM.

I have learned so much about how to image the brain and the different steps which take place in order to clear the amyloid beta protein out of the brain to prevent Alzheimer's. It is so cool to work with mouse brain and be able to image it so see exactly what you want to under he microscope. I cant wait to see what my images look like next week!