Week 2 Reflections on Summer Internship

I’m excited to report that I’ve begun to fall into the routine of the lab after my second week at the MGH Center for Engineering in Medicine and Surgery. I’ve become comfortable navigating from the 37°C warm room to the -20°C freezer to the 4°C cold room to the -80°C freezer. I’ve learned how to use the hematology analysers, the flow cytometers, the hemacytometer. I’ve completed my cell culture analysis, and have become proficient in performing aseptic technique with biosafety cabinets, along with thawing cells, changing cell media, freezing cells, and fixing cells.

The foundation of much of our blood work begins with monocyte isolation, so I’ve become quite familiar with using the Human CD14 Positive Selection kit. Each day we receive fresh patient blood samples; the more blood we receive, the greater number of experiments we are able to run. The kit has two main parts– the antibody cocktail and the magnetic particles. We first add the tetrameric antibody complexes monocytes, which bind to the monocytes due to the CD14 antigen strongly-expressed on their surface. Then, we add dextran-coated magnetic particles that bind to the antibody complexes. Through exposing the tubes to a magnet, the monocytes of interest collect and remain at the sides of the tube, while the unwanted cells are washed away.

In addition to my typical immunology work, I was also extremely honored to be invited by another summer intern friend to watch a rat transplant surgery being performed by her summer mentor. Early research has shown that supercooling can triple the time that organs are viable for transplantation, and this particular surgery was intended to be a control group for an experiment testing supercooling of rat limbs. Although rat limbs are typically only viable for 6 hours, this limb had been supercooled for 3 days. I was originally concerned about how gory my first surgery would be, but I found the whole process to be mesmerizing, and even a bit beautiful. My favorite part was watching the anastomosis– the sewing of the veins and arteries back together. I could only marvel at the skill it took to connect such microscopic tissue together.