Joe Yuan @ The Mason Lab: Post #4: Fütball

Oh god I'm only on my 4th post?

So, remember when the Euros where happening?

Well, maybe it wasn't the most memorable UEFA Euro Cup ever, but my experience of celebrating football (yes. it is football.) with my lab was one of the memorable bonding moments of my internship at the Mason Lab.

Since England was an embarrassment and got destroyed early on, and Wales managed to conserve their way to the semis, Dr. Mason, with her English and Welsh heritage, decided to take us all to see the game at 3pm in the afternoon, at a bar.

Here we see Dr. Nikki Mason in her standard dress code.

We were all excited and ready for Wales to kick Portugal and C. Ronaldo's butt, and the grad students were all over the Belgian beer at City Tap House. 

So. We lost. 

Oh well, the game was "Rubbish", and I guess the finals maybe more exciting with Ronaldo and the Portuguese squad. (Turns out CR gets his ankle twisted, and has to sit on the side lines. Thats what he gets for winning against the great nation of Wales.) 

But yes, back to the Lab. It was a slow week, with me doing more maxi preps of cCD19 plasmid and other important backbones that will hopefully last the lab the rest of the summer. And since it was a slow week, I deiced to stay another week to truly experience the frustration of research. Yep, so there goes my summer. 

Anyways here's some DNA concentration and purity data:

The computer software that shows your the nano drop readings.

The way this works is, you add your sample to the Nanodrop machine, and it analyzes said data, and gives your a purity reading in 260/280, and 260/230. These two values will tell you if your DNA or RNA sample is contaminated. And the ng/uL is obviously the DNA Concentration in your solution. So that's exciting that there's DNA in this one. 

And to add on to my last post, the cCD19 virus has been transduced into K562 canine cells, and now we are trying to determine if the CD19 protein is being presented on the surface of the K562s. The issue now is that the original plasmid we generated was missing a section of the cCD19 sequence because fellow lab member who is no longer here decided that region was problematic and cut it out. But now we don't know wether if that caused the proteins produced now to be non functional and not present on the surface of the cell. 

So we ran the K562s through flow cytometry:

Very interesting.

So, our results were fascinating. Because it seems our controls of K562 without CD19 actually bound better to our secondary than the K562 cells with CD19. It could be that the cells aren't functioning very well since they were just transduced. We are going to have to run this experiment a few more times with different variables to see what the actual problem is. But this is a great example of what excitement research can bring. It really is strange, and we're going to have to figure out why this binding situation is happening. 

But I believe, that we will get lucky. 

~ Joe