Day 11

October 26, 2011

This was my favorite Wednesday so far. Today we did cell culture. JM decided that SeungHa and I would have separate turns, so we could have one on one. I was able to go first. He guided us through each step throughout the whole process. The point of this project was to be able to count the number of cells that we were making. I started by pipetting  10ml of medium, aspirating it out, and repeating this process a couple of times.  Then, I pipetted 2ml of Typsin and gently rocked the container back and forth to make a layer on the bottom of the container. Then we placed the container into an incubator for 5 minutes. Afterwards, we pipetted 8ml of medium into the container and placed it in a centrifuge which spins it around really quickly. The spinning created a separation between the medium and the cells. We then aspirated the medium but not the cells. We pipetted 10ml of medium into the container that only contained the cells. Then we pipetted two 10ml samples into a small graduated pipet and added Trypin Blue. Trypin Blue indicates dead cells under a microscople. After this whole procedure, we went downstaris and looked at the cells that I made under their high-tech microscope. They have a certain machine that allows us to look at a certain area of cells. We manually counted these cells in this area and multiply it by a very big number which I don't remember. That number is an approximation of the total number of cells. Then we brought the cells to a different machine that automatically counted the cells. Once we finished, SeungHa repeated the same process that I did.