They call me the cell killer.

Summer is here, apparently. That’s what one of the PhD students told me. Why? The summer interns have arrived. A boy and a girl. Yes, already. They study in Pune, so they’re getting a head start even though their vacations haven’t started. Plus side? I’m not going to be at the bottom of the lab pecking order now! Both of them seem nice enough. And the girl isn’t hard on the eyes, so that helps :D

It turns out that you can kill Schneider cells (the fly cells) as well. At least it wasn’t a spontaneous mass suicide like those fussy HeLa cells I was working with last semester. Yes, I know for a human derived cell line, HeLa is pretty hardy. But you wouldn’t think so if you could see the kind of abuse S2 can take in its stride and keep going strong. I mean, these cells can survive for 15-20 days with no medium change, nothing. HeLa would’ve died 3 times over by that time.

Anyway, back to the dead S2 cells. It was human error this time. I put the cells in a petri plate in an incubator without a humidifier. Left it there on Friday. Monday morning, the plate’s dry. I mean, properly dry. Why didn’t anybody realize this could happen? We’ve been growing S2 in flasks till now. The flasks have screw-on caps, and S2 cells aren’t too fussy about oxygen concentration. So we screw the caps on tight, and the medium doesn’t evaporate.

The take home message? Petri plates with liquid medium need a humidifier. I’m learning, see?