Well, the first thing is that things have definitely gotten a little ridiculously busy. With renewed fervour in collecting eggs and starting fresh cultures, my incubator has now accumulated close to 40 plates of cultures, all of them screaming and demanding some fresh media either every Monday and Thursday or every Tuesday and Friday. To make things all the more complicated, they are suspension cells and are thus not attached to the wells, preventing me from simply sucking out all the media with a vacuum and an evil laugh.
And of course, I am now one co-op student working on two separate and completely different projects. Not only am I now responsible for growing some honeybee cells, I will also be responsible for some bacterial assays. So yes, I do both cell cultures AND bacterial cultures.
However, on a brighter note my bee cultures have turned the corner and are now doing fairly well. After numerous tries and countless failed attempts, we were blessed with cultures that appeared like the following (I really hope I don't get sued for releasing these photos.......I don't recall signing anything that tells me I can't.....there were more photos, but they were all blurry and out of focus):
Culture 6 No Antibiotics, 200x Phase Contrast Microscope, with suspension embryonic cells and adherent fibroblastsWe have finally realized what has been screwing us over, and that is the antibiotics we have been using. We had it at such a ridiculously high concentration that none of our cells grew properly. But now that we've reduced the antibiotic concentration by almost 1000 fold, things are starting to look pretty. There was even this one clump of cell that was contracting periodically as if it was a heart. It was totally wicked XD definitely not something we were shown at school =P
So, looking at my lab related schedule for the next little while...
July 11 - Flying to Grande Prairie
July 15 - Expected Return Date
July 27 - Project Presentation
Once School Starts - Co-op Paper Due
o_O*
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