Week 2

It's week two and Stephanie, my lab partner, and I are loving the work we are doing at the Boston University Photonics Center.  This is a picture of Stephanie.  She is a great partner to work with.  She really knows her stuff!


We began this week by using the Hi-Mag IRIS machine to capture images of the spots of antibodies on the chips we created last week.  We figured out the parameters of maneuvering the chip in order to locate the spots.  This is actually more difficult than it appears.  It feels great to have accomplished this step.  On Tuesday, our "BBLunch" session with Prof. Ruane was very informative, showing us the path researchers take in order to publish their work.  Wednesday began with a lab meeting, our first.  I was surprised to see how many students are researching in this lab.  We had only met or seen about four up to this point. There is an entire crew working here.  They are a fun group.  On Thursday we got to purify some virus samples using dialysis with the hope that this process will improve their binding to antibodies.  I am about to go down to the lab now to continue working on the chips we made this morning.

   So why, exactly, are we doing all this?  Our lab group, George, Carlos, Alexander (to name a few) is trying to develop a sensor machine that identifies specific viruses.  The system they have developed works but the challenge we are working on is to find an antibody that grabs the H1N1 virus we are using in the research.  This is a trial and error process in which we change the type of antibody and the procedure for preparing the viruses for this process.  Stephanie and I have spent time in the lab with George processing the viral solutions and placing the "spots" of antibodies on the chips. That's me preparing one of our chips.  Our controls for spotting viruses has been that we use several antibodies or no antibodies for each chip and compare the virus attachment for each type of spot  We measure the virus attachment by looking at the images of each spot, looking for virus particles.  We have not yet used the newest machine, the NSF Air, but once we do, we will compare the images taken on the Air to the data gathered from the High-Mag bench-top imaging machine.  For me, the lab procedures have been new but I have some great teachers (Stephanie, George, Carlos, and now Alexander).  That's me and George at the spotting machine.