Errare humannum est..

So, as it turned out, my guide's cells were contaminated. There was zero growth in one of the plates, and very patchy growth in the other one. One of the other professors said it looked like there was a lot of debris in her plates. My cells, on the other hand, grew quite nicely. Almost 90% confluency (almost the whole plate was covered with a lawn of cells) and they looked pretty healthy.

So, on Friday, we split my 293Ts into two plates, in case we aren't able to revive the one other plate. And when I checked on Saturday, cells in both plates seem to have settled down quite nicely. We still haven't figured out what went wrong on Monday, though. Just hope it doesn't happen again.

A second batch of HeLa cells came in from Hyderabad on Thursday. The first lot came in two weeks ago, but they were in pretty bad shape when we received them. They were contaminated and we couldn't salvage anything. We tried splitting the second lot of HeLa cells as well on Friday. Come Saturday, and it looked like the same contaminant which hit the first lot had hit these cells too. There were clumps of white cell-like structures floating in the medium ( I couldn't see a distinct nucleus in any of 'em). Funnily though, HeLa were growing just fine at the bottom of the plate. I really hope we can fix this soon.

Proudest moment this week: The prof who was supervising my work while my guide was away told me I had good hands, and that I'd taken to cell culture like a duck to water. Granted he didn't watch me for more than 20 mins, but it still felt good to hear stuff like that. Makes me feel much more at ease with what I'm doing.