What I do

So some of my friends are less curious about my actual research and more curious about what I do on a day to day basis in lab. Here is my lab bench, devoid of dramatic lighting and shiny high-tech equipment and lasers, don't let tv fool you :P



Actually I lied there's totally dramatic light and UV hoods and toxic chemical and lasers (more on that in a bit).




Yes things are literally labeled with skull and crossbones still

However, most of last week was spend working in a freezing cold microtome (notice where it says -20 Celsius, imagine your arms stuck in there for 4 hours straight with nothing but latex gloves). This machine basically works like a really cold meat slicer, with a very sharp blade that has caused every single lab injury I've ever seen, all resulting in ER visits.



Making 1 cell thick sections of immunized mouse spleens.



There are literally 400 sections from one spleen all numbered and neatly lined up and stored at -80. I have probably about a thousand sections lined up currently.



What do I do with these sections? Basically this:





If you're interested on how I do this:

A lot of what I do is called immunohistochemistry or immunofluorescence, which is just big words for adding glowy things to what I want to look at on tissues via antibodies (those things that are made to fight foreign invaders in your body). These are not photos of my own but they'll help explain things. Basically I stain my sections with various colored antibodies labeling different things I'm interested in, and look at them under a fluorescence microscope:



Each compound I use to label has a certain 'excitation' wavelength - the color of laser I use to hit it - and 'emission' spectra - the color it actually looks when viewing it.



We have 7 lasers on our microscope, using them pretty much looks like this (it's a bad idea to stare at the real thing):



You take a picture at each wavelength you're interested in (corresponding to one marker you want to look at) and then compile all the images together.



Voila!