Week 3:
University of Chicago Medical Center

July 15, 2013

Fellow in Research

Due to the 4th of July holiday this was a little bit of a shorter week.
Over the weekend I got to meet up with some Chicago Cornellians, Melinda and Millie, and see the city a little bit! Here we are visiting the “Bean” in Millennium Park!

On Monday I got to do a practice run of the procedure I will be doing for the research. We are curious as to which cells the exosomes are going to and if they have a preference for a certain cell. So I introduced red-tagged exosomes to the slice cultures and then tagged the oligodendrocytes (a type of cell in the brain) in the slice cultures green. To do all of this I had to first bind primary antibodies to the oligodendrocytes and then bind the secondary to the primary antibody. The secondary fluoresces green and allows us to see where the oligodendrocytes are. These images only show the oligodendrocytes. It had been too long since the exosomes had been tagged red and the red fluorescence had diminished.

I also ran a gel to check the purity of the conjugated QD-CD63 population that we isolated last week.

This image suggests that our population is basically pure.Kae and I then made two batches of exosomes and QD-CD63 and mixed them in order for the QD-CD63 to tag the exosomes.

Tuesday was a short day due to our weekly lab meeting in the morning. I worked with data analysis in the afternoon. I went for a run after lab with my friend Jazlyn. Here is us at Promontory Point!

On the way back to our dorm we found Cornell Ave!

On Wednesday Kae and I took one of the gels we ran last week and cut out the band of conjugated QD-CD63 that we isolated. We then placed the band in a dialysis tube and used electrophoresis to separate the QD-CD63 from the gel.

At the beginning of the week I had a meeting with all the other students in my program and we got to learn about the application process for medical school from the University of Chicago’s Deputy Provost, Dr. McDade. Dr. McDade actually started the PSOMER program back in 2007. In 2012 the average MCAT score for the incoming class at Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago was 36! It’s pretty cool to hear what he has to say since he helps with the medical school interview process here at the University of Chicago!