May 2009 - In Which Amy Makes A Little Experimental Progress

For the first two week of May, my job was to provide support and resources for one of our collaborating scientists who visited us to do some research in our lab. Yoshiyuki Yamamoto (aka. Yamachan) worked for Bill for seven years as a post-doc before starting his own Evo-Devo lab at University College London. In my opinion, he's the world's best hand at doing lens transplantation in fish embryos. He's also very good at micromanipulation techniques like microinjection, and wrote the protocol we use in the Jeffery Lab as our standard. This year he came to do some injections of shh mRNA into surface fish for Bill with a new microinjection method he's developed, and as a result Masato and I got the opportunity to see him in action first hand.

For those of you who don't know, microinjection is a technique wherein you use a very tiny glass needle under a microscope to puncture the membrane of a cell or embryo and inject foreign material into it. It looks much like the video below when you look through the scope:

The only real difference for us is that we are injecting tiny volumes of mRNA right when the embryo first starts dividing so that we can affect genetic expression from the start. This video show cells being injected into a more mature embryo called a blastocyst. The technique itself is fascinating to learn and I will need a lot more practice to gain the dexterity to be really good at it but you can do a lot of neat experiments with it, especially in developmental biology.

The only downside to the two weeks was that since you have to inject the fish right when the cells start dividing, you have to be around when the fish start spawning. And our fish spawn during the night. I'm not a big fan of staying up all night, I never have been. I also had to pull a lot of 14 hour days at work since just because I was learning a new technique didn't mean that I got out of managerial duties the next day. I had to be in by 9am at the latest, even if I was up 'till 2 the night before, for two straight weeks. Boy was I tired and cranky at the end of it all! The third week of May was supposed to be recovery time, but I ended up being too busy prepping for the major water pipe refit the campus went under during the last week of May, and the annual review of our Animal Use protocol was due then too. Oh! And I was trying out a new staining technique on fat cells for Bill to look at before he left to spend the summer at Woods Hole.

Seriously, I need a clone of myself.