Hi y'all,
After a bit of a busy few days I'm back to the blog. Today I was able to use our 780 microscope to image the cells in the head end of my fish as they move to form immature blood, immature blood vessels and the central layer of cells in the developing heart called the endocardium. This is totally awesome in its own right, but I got to do a significant part of this process myself under the supportive guidance of my supervisor. Those of you who know me and my strengths- sophisticated microscopy really is far far from a strength or even a capability for me. This made today even more special for me as I was learning and practicing a fantastic technique while collecting impressive and beautiful data. Working in science may not be the most financially rewarding but it really has the potential to be one of the most rewarding vocations. Obviously I'm saying this at the end of a day spent capturing the most beautiful movie of my career to date, not at the end of a fruitless day adding colourless liquid to another colourless liquid, of which there are many to bear in a PhD.
This wasn't even the time course (movie made from a series of images) we had intended to capture, or the backup, this was plan C! Yesterday I prepared embryos that would have my cells of interest (the ones that contain the Scl factor) labelled in green, the outer edge (membrane) in bright blue and the nucleus (the bag of DNA in the centre of a cell) in red. Sadly we couldn't separate the signal from our green cells from the blue signal made by every cell- the head of the fish looked amazing but had no scientific relevence- poop. Cliche- but beauty really isn't everything!
Toodle-pip,
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