July 16th AM

The presentation on spider silk was very interesting. I was a molecular biology graduate student 20 years ago and I understood everything that she was doing. I like watching the silk fibers dropping down from the protein solution and the red eyes silkworm looked like aliens. It would be great if they can make silkworms produce colored silk like green silk, red silk, blue silk. Will be really cool. I could have done some similar molecular biology stuff if I am in the spider lab. I finished the lesson planing part one and will be working on the worksheets and curriculum mapping next week.

July 14th AM

Today, we waited on Nathan to come and scan precancerous cells on elasticity. He appeared at 10am. He got some cells from the incubator and changed the buffer so that the cells are all in the same buffer environment. Then he started the combi microscope and getiing the cantilever tip to focus in water at 37 degrees which is body temperature. The cells live as long as 6 hrs. at body temperature. they survive only 1 to 2 hrs. at 25 degrees or room temperature. It took him a long time to find the laser and he has to add more immersion oil.It is time for lunch.

cmap

July 13th AM

Today, we watch Rory repeat his experiments on precancerous cells to get more data on the elasticity or softness of the cells. Basically, you indent the cell at various points with the cantilever tip and pull back the tip and look at the force graph that is plotted. A gentle slope means that the cell is soft. A steep slope means that the cell is more rigid and less elastic. They pick the nucleus to test for elasticity so far. I think they should pick somewhere on the cell membrane if they really want to measure the elasticity of the cell. The nucleus is like the egg yolk of an egg. To test how hard the egg is, you would really test the hardness of the shell and not the egg yolk??? Just my opinion. I may be wrong.I worked on the lesson plan assignment while waiting for someone to appear at the lab.

July 12th PM

We worked on our posters and practise on Vpython. It is a cool software and we try different things on it like varying position, radius and color of the spheres, drawing arrows, and making a ball bounce on the floor. It would be fun for students to experiment with Vpython in their math classes to make the ball do different things.

July 12th AM

Today, Rory and Alex are looking at the data of the precancerous cells that they had collected last week. They probed 4 cell lines with cantilever tip to measure how elastic each cell was. They measure elasticity by indenting the cell with the tip at various regions, especially over the nucleus. The cells auto-fluoresce so thay can view the nucleus , nucleolous and cytoplasm easily. They hope to find a trend of elasticity across the cell lines. So far they have not gotten any good trend yet. There were different slopes on the force map for different cells, indicating different degrees of elasticity.

July 9th AM

We try to calibrate the combination AFM and confocal microscope with a new software. The goal is to align the image of the AFM with the image of confocal microscope. First, we looked at some ATTO molecules with the confocal microscope and measure the fluorescent lifetimes of the ATTO molecules. Olaf wants to test another way of drying the sample. It is an ACE duster moisture-free for cleaning computers. It contains tetrafluoroethane which is heavier than air. He intends to spray some of this gas onto samples in petri-dish. The goal of the new software is to make the AFM tells the confocal microscope the position of the cantilever and whether it touches the surface.