Foreign Perspectives

The final thing we’d done yesterday was to pick the “further experiment” that we’d be doing today and tomorrow. There wasn’t nearly as much chaos in that as expected and almost everyone got their first choice of experiment.

Work on our immunocytochemistry project began quite slowly as such things tend to do but before long we were into the swing of preparing quite a number of different reagents over the course of the day and applying the various blocking solutions, primary antibodies and secondary antibodies. Much the same as we’d done earlier but with different antibodies and blocking solutions as we were aiming to find out if CCR5 is expressed on the surface and not inside the cells.

As with yesterdays washing exercises, nothing was to be visible until the very end of the day when the colouring enzyme was applied. It turns out that this must be prepared freshly (even 10 minutes is too long for it to sit) so one group had a minor panic when nothing happened. We thought that nothing had happened either but hadn’t thought that since we’ll be looking for the effects in a microscope, that the cells were pretty small and in fact looked like there was some dust at the bottom of the well.

There was a fair bit of reshuffling of groups this evening as we’ve eight topics to present on Friday morning, 32 people to present them and we were all in groups of 2 or 3. It all worked out quite quickly though and I’ll be part of a slightly larger group presenting the cytochemistry project which is the penultimate one (not a great position).

The final tutorial was one aimed at both SXR375 and SXR376 though all but a couple of those attending were from SXR376. It was on the end of course assessment and seemed rather more general than the, supposedly identical, tutorial on the topic that I’d went to for SXR375 so I’ll have to hunt out my notes from that one when I get home.