Week 7:
University of Chicago Medical Center

August 13, 2013

Fellow in Research

This weekend was pretty awesome!
On Saturday my suitemate Chelsey and I went to Wicker Park and explored a street festival there. We found a photo booth and had some fun!

I got to shadow Dr. McDade, who is an anesthesiologist, at the University of Chicago Hospital on Sunday. I got to watch him instruct a resident on how to do two epidurals. He also explained everything as he went which was super interesting! But the coolest thing was when he did a spinal anesthesia/spinal block for a woman who was pregnant with identical twins. After that, I was able to watch the entire caesarean section from start to finish! It was amazing to get to see the two baby girls be born! The twins were monochorionic-diamniotic, meaning that they shared the same placenta but had their own amniotic sac.

Since our staining was working we proceeded to do the second half of slices for our staining on Monday.

Tuesday we had another confocal appointment to image the slices we stained Monday.

We noticed something really interesting about the staining for the oligodendrocytes. The exosomes, which are shown in the red image, outlined the oligodendrocytes (which are shown in the green image). At first we didn’t notice this because as you can see in the 3rd image, which is an overlay of the red and green images, the red outline isn’t distinct. So we didn’t count many positive cells (positive cells=cells that contained the exosomes) at first. However, once we noticed the red outlines, we determined that those were also positive cells.

On Wednesday we went back over the images from the 1st confocal appointment to see if there were any red outlines in those images as well and recounted the number of positive cells. After we recounted the images we got to finally perform statistical analysis on the data. I was super nervous that we would have done all that work and maybe not have found statistical significance. Luckily I was wrong and we found that environmentally enriched exosomes trafficked preferentially to oligodendrocytes in comparison to non-environmentally enriched exosomes!!!! So exciting!

Thursday and Friday I worked on putting all of my data and images into graphs and figures for my oral presentation next week. So many little details to work out that I would never have thought of before, like not using Excel to make my graphs and having to do all the lines and stuff in a new software program.