On Monday, all our 293Ts croaked (if you can call it that. Maybe individual cells actually do make tiny gasps when they die) Talk about cockiness. The medium changed colour completely, and all the cells detached themselves from the bottom of the plates. And we have absolutely no idea why that happened. The cells may have grown too fast, used up all the medium, run out of nutrition and starved to death. But that's just my theory.
To make things worse, on Thursday all the HeLa cells died. Every last one. They were in trouble right from the beginning, so it wasn't entirely unexpected.
Now that there aren't any cells around, most of my work over the next few days will be reading about checkpoint proteins. When DNA in cells is damaged (by UV or some chemical agent) and if the cell's DNA replicating machinery detects the damage, the cell is prevented from multiplying till the damage is repaired. Checkpoint proteins bring about this arrest. And I will be studying one of these proteins over the course of my project.
Of course, to study these proteins, we need to kill the cells and extract them. And we need to prepare 30 plates of cells each time. So far, we haven't even been able to sustain cultures of 3 plates. Apparently, this kind of trouble is always there while starting a new lab in India. So wish me luck. I'm going to need lots of it to get through.
2 comments:
all the best. am sure things would work out soon.
(lab disasters and me are old friends, so you have all my sympathy!)
Good luck!!!
And if it's any comfort, 90% of any experimental science is debugging, so seems like you're on the right path there! :-P
Post a Comment