Week 5:
University of Chicago Medical Center

July 30, 2013

Fellow in Research

This past weekend my family came to visit me in Chicago! Of course we went to Giordano’s for deep dish pizza!

We also went to a Cubs vs. Cardinals game. Sadly the Cardinals lost 🙁

Taste of Chicago was going on so we stopped by there before they drove back to Iowa. Although it seems like the 1st 4 weeks flew by, it has been hard not being able to see my family.

So on Monday we had another confocal appointment. Our Q-dots weren’t as bright as we would have liked, but we could still see them. However, these mysterious blob-like cells were stained green on our slides!!! That made it hard to see the cells we really were concerned about.

Tuesday we did a couple stains for microglia and olidodendrocytes without any Q-dots. We used the microscope in our lab to look at the slides and the blobs were there again! We thought maybe something had happened to our secondary antibody that stains green.

To check if our green secondary antibody was the problem on Wednesday we did two different microglia stains, one red and one green.


In both the red and green stains the blobs were present! Thus our secondary antibody isn’t our problem.

We thought maybe something was wrong with the primary antibodies for microglia and oligodendrocytes! So we started prepping some slices to stain for neurons and astrocytes since those require different primary antibodies.

On Thursday I finished the staining for astrocytes and neurons. The neurons were stained well but there were more cells stained than should be, probably those dreaded blobs again!

The astrocytes were stained green but those blobs make the image a bit fuzzy.

I also went to a mentor lunch on Thursday. It was helpful to hear what criteria the medical student based his medical school choice on.

Our new secondary antibodies came on Friday! We tried the staining for neurons and astrocytes with the new secondary antibodies and guess what! The blobs were still there! Below is a picture of the stain for neurons.

We went back to the drawing board and systematically went through each part of the staining to see where the blobs first appeared. We were able to narrow it down quite a bit so hopefully next week we will figure it out and be able to stain again!

Even though things haven’t quite been working out as planned, I still learned a lot this week! Trying to problem-solve the staining issue definitely involved a lot of critical thinking! I feel like we are very close to solving the staining problem and hopefully this time next week I will be getting blob-free stains!