Immunostaining

I'm currently sitting in the part of our lab that is located in the basement of Beckmen. This room is were our Ziess microscope is located along with our cell storage incubator and other lab necessities that would be around.

Right now I am in the middle of an immunostaining protocol with Jing and "the professor." This is the first time I am seeing this done in this lab, but I have done a similar protocol for my MCB (Molecular and cellular biology) Lab class I had last semester. I don't like to refer to the MCB department too much. They still have a lot to do with regards to improving how they run things. I feel pain in my head everytime I think about it (MCB).

I have also received permission to add the procedures I created the other day to the labs protocol lists.


My lab's "openwetware wiki" page

Protocol generator

Yesterday and today I have been working on finalizing some written instructions on how to do some procedures so that future people that show up to this lab can easily do what we are doing. I'm going to post them him just for the heck of it. If anyone happens to be looking at this blog and wants to suggest ways I could make things better I would appreciate the feedback.

The first protocol I made was in the way of a flow chart. It is for the operation of our vacuum oven chamber. It is actually quite simple to use (well at least for me).

This is (hopefully) the "idiot proof" flow chart for operation of this device.

Well that was the part for the Vacuum Oven. My next step was to generate a protocol for creation of glass bottom dishes for use our super cool FRET analysis Ziess microscope our lab has. We choose to make our own dishes because to buy them pre-made is about 2 dollars a pop. As long as we maintain cleanliness I support the more cost effective method.

Click on this link to view the PDF of the protocol I created. (It even has pictures!)

First post

I've been volunteering in a lab at the Beckman Institute ( www.beckman.uiuc.edu )for about 2 years now. Although I personally feel that I haven't really done much other than watch a lot of protocols and well...watch more protocols....and yup...watch even more protocols. Oh and sprinkle in some cell culture. I do a bunch of crazy classes on top of all this which is probubly why I have not had a lot of time to do some actual research projects on my own, but this should be changing this semester. I'll be updating details from what I have been doing since the begging of the semester and giving this link to my Professor of this lab so that he can get an idea of what I have been doing. Bear in mind this is all raw inpute with verry little editing of my grammer so if i mess up with my spilling it is because I don't have much time to edit my entriez.

Below are some pictures of one of the lab rooms and Jing, the graduate student I am working with.