A day in the lab

Using 3D-printed equipment to standardise experiments

Sometimes you just have to improvise in the lab...

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Using a Nobel prize-winning technique

Today in the lab I was breaking up bacteria to extract a gene I inserted into them...

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Processing muscle biopsies for microscopy

Today in the lab I was mounting muscle biopsies on microscope slides after immunostaining them...

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A day in the lab

Using colour to determine the pH

Today in the lab I was doing an experiment involving brain cells kept in cell culture flasks...

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A day in the lab

Preparing a protein for long-term storage

Today in the lab I was preparing a stock of a protein for long-term storage...

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A day in the lab

Amplifying genes quickly using bacteria

Today in the lab I was breaking up bacteria to extract a gene I inserted into them...

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A day in the lab

Using virues to transfer genes to a cell

Today in the lab I was using a virus to transfer a specific gene into a mammalian cell...

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Running A LOT of quantitative PCR

Today in the lab I was running a lot of quantitative PCR (qPCR) plates...

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Handling liquid nitrogen safely

Today in the lab I was using liquid nitrogen to snap-freeze brain tissue...

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Speeding up pipetting

Today in the lab I was using a multichannel pipette to speed up a biochemical assay...

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A day in the lab

Dissecting a brain

Today in the lab I was dissecting a brain...

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A day in the lab

A biochemical assay to determine protein concentrations

Today's experiment was a biochemical assay to determine the concentration of a protein released by brain cells...

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A day in the lab

PCR and gel electrophoresis to determine genotypes

Today in the lab I was doing genotyping. Samples of DNA were collected from the latest litters of the lab's colonies and their genotype had to be determined to check which of them carry genetic mutations in specific genes...

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A day in the lab

Gel electrophoresis to visualise DNA

Today in the lab I was doing some genotyping to determine which DNA samples contained a specific mutation...

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Removing the meninges from the brain

Today in the lab I spent a long time dissecting some brains. During the dissection, I need to remove the meninges before I can proceed to collect the parts of the brain that are used for glial cell culture...

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Cryopreservation of brain cells

Today in the lab I spent a long time cryopreserving some brain cells for later use. It took me approximately 3 hours without breaks to prepare only 10 samples...

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A day in the lab

Purifying plasmid DNA from bacterial cultures

Today in the lab I was doing a miniprep experiment. This experiment allows the purification of plasmid DNA from bacterial cultures...

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A day in the lab

Dissecting neonatal brains to get glial cells

Today in the lab I was dissecting neonatal brains, in order to get glial cells and culture them for my experiments...

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A day in the lab

Inspecting microglia dissected out of neonatal brains

Today in the lab I was looking at brain microglia which were isolated from a mixed culture of both microglia and astrocytes three days earlier...

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A day in the lab

Phase-contrast microscopy

One of the things I did today in the lab, was to check the health of some cells growing in culture, and to estimate their numbers because they need to be of a certain confluency before I can use them for any experiments...

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A day in the lab

Bacterial transformation

Today in the lab I did a bacterial transformation experiment, then left the bacteria to grow on agar plates overnight, so that they would clone themselves and produce multiple copies of a gene I am interested in...

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A day in the lab

Inoculating bacterial cultures

Today in the lab, I inoculated four flasks of bacterial cultures, which will be left overnight for the bacterial to clone themselves and produce multiple copies of a piece of DNA that I put into them...

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Immunohistochemistry of brain slices and confocal microscopy

Today in the lab I was using the confocal microscope to look at different cell types on brain slices...

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Analysing the calcium activity of the white matter

Today in the lab, I was analysing the calcium activity of the white matter in the corpus callosum (the area of the brain that connects the two hemispheres)...

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Immunocytochemistry of cultured cells and confocal microscopy

Today in the lab I was using the confocal microscope to look at different cell types in culture...

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A day in the lab

Analysing the electrical activity of neurons using computer code

Today in the lab, I spent a lot of my time on the computer, analysing the electrical activity of neurons that I had previously recorded during my electrophysiology experiments...

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A day in the lab

Recording neuronal activity using electrophysiology equipment

Today in the lab I was doing an electrophysiology experiment, specifically known as the patch-clamp technique...

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A day in the lab

Histopathological analysis of brain slices following a stroke

Today in the lab I was analysing H&E stained brain slices to identify histopathological changes following a stroke...

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A day in the lab

Processing brain slices for microscopy

Today's experiment in the lab was all about staining brain slices with Hematoxylin & Eosin (H&E) for microscopy. In the timelapse below, you can see me performing the experiment, which lasted about 3.5 hours...

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A day in the lab

MRI image analysis to assess stroke damage

Today in the lab, I spent the entire time doing image analysis, using the MRI scans collected during an experiment that was testing possible new treatments for stroke...

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