Class of 2014: Freshman Blog

In January, I began work as an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Cell Engineering (Neuroregeneration and Stem Cell Biology programs) at the School of Medicine. It has been an unbelievably rewarding experience, and since there’s been so much interest among the pre-frosh and prospective applicants regarding what it’s really like to be involved in research at Hopkins, I thought I’d microblog my day. I’ll do my best to give you a accurate play-by-play of what goes on in my lab. Ready? LET’S GO!

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7:31am: Alarm just went off. My roommate’s still asleep, so I shut it off as quickly as possible. Time to shower, get dressed and go get something to eat before I catch the 8:25 JHMI shuttle down to the School of Medicine. It’s going to be a good day.

8:15am: Just woke up again…I put my head down for one second, and I was out. But I gotta run, there’s a shuttle with my name on it that’s about to pull up in front of the JHU B&N on St. Paul Street.

8:28am: On the bus, all is well. I was lucky to get a seat in the back. This thing is packed. We’re passing Penn Station!

8:45am: I’ve just arrived at the School of Medicine. The shuttle let me off at the East Monument & Broadway stop. I walked over to the Broadway Research Building, where I work.

8:55am: I stroll (nay, I saunter) into the lab. Now that I’ve made it to the 7th floor of the BRB, my day’s luck has surely been restored. I say hello to my post-doc, Maged, and set about getting out the slides I didn’t get to finish preparing on Tuesday. Mouse brain sections at 30 microns thickness in well-plates are removed meticulously with a tiny paintbrush and then (in a phospate buffer solution, or PBS) arranged on a glass slide. Later, once they’ve dried, I’ll stain them with whatever protocol Maged tells me to. But that’s a spoiler.

10:34am: Okay, time to stretch my legs. I’m about to take a lap around the lab. My favorite place to not work at work? The Cold Room. But I’ve got several more slides that I need to prep before lunch, so I’d better get to it.

12:12pm: Slides are done. Now I’m just waiting for my good friend Ardi Mendoza (who works in the adjacent lab and is also the recently elected president of the Student Government Association…he’s quite the achiever) to finish up his cell quantification. Okay, he just finished and gave me the “let’s get the hell out of here” wave. Thai food, here we come!

1:08pm: Back from lunch. One of the best things about working at the School of Medicine is the easy access to all the amazing food in the neighborhood. There are all kinds of great take-out restaurants, and even an indoor market about two blocks past the School of Public Health on E. Monument.

1:20pm: I asked Maged what I should do with the slides I just prepped. He told me to let them dry in a drawer, so as to protect them from the light. He told me that I’m going to be doing some immunohistochemistry–something that I’ve never done before…so I’ll walk you through it.

First, I have to make a 0.2% Triton X-100 solution in PBS. East enough. I turn around and, lo and behold, there on the shelf is the Triton X-100! In 50ml of PBS, to make a 0.2% TX-100 solution, I only need 100μl. Done. Solution made. Now what? Well, now I have to vortex it for about a minute (which involves holding it on a high-vibration rubber platform until your hand feels like it’s going to fall off) and then sonicate it for 30 minutes (which involves placing the tube with my solution into a machine known as an ultrasonic bath, or a sonicator, that uses sound energy to agitate particles in a sample). During the sonication, I’ve got to distribute 22 sections from each of the 5 brains that I’m working with into four wells in a 24-well plate. So I’ll use 20 wells total, with an average of 5.5 sections in each well. Okay, then the whole well-plate will go into the 0.2% Triton X-100/PBS solution for 30 minutes. Now for the blocking solution. It’s a 2% normal goat serum (which, ironically, is a very bizarre name) in a 0.02% Triton X-100 solution in PBS. So, I’ll just dilute my last solution 10x by volume of PBS and add 2% of the normal goat serum. Long story short, I put the sections in that solution and then incubate it at 4°C (39°F) overnight. Done for now.

3:47pm: Having completed that, I’m going to go talk to Maged what we’re going to be doing after he publishes his paper. He’ll be submitting it soon, we’re all very excited. I’ll be working this summer, and he and I have been discussing getting me my own project to run for the next few years. So, it’s time for some brainstorming. I love this job.

4:58pm: It’s time to head out. Today was mostly a bench day, meaning that I just sat and did a lot of work sorting and prepping tissues for staining, imaging and lesion quantification (all of which I will do next Tuesday). In my time here, though, I’ve done everything from surgery on mice to statistical analysis of lesion studies. Just recently I went through the training necessary to access and work in the animal research facility in the basement of the BRB, so I’m excited to be able to learn a bunch more procedures. Also, no big deal or anything, when I was down there last I saw Professor Sol Snyder, the very namesake of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. He just happens to have the highest Hirsch Index (a measure of both the productivity and impact of the published work of a scientist) of any living biologist, and ranks among the ten most often cited biologists of all time. I’m a little proud of my knees for not buckling.

It’s been a good day at NeuroICE, and I’m going to head home now. There’s a shuttle waiting for me outside the School of Public Health, so I’d better go catch it…I’ve got to get to soccer practice on time!

GO HOP!!!