Things Can go Wrong

So past week wasn’t as great as I hoped It would be. When writing my previous blog post, I was hoping that my experiment will last and I will get some data out of it. Unfortunately, a big part of any PhD is the struggle, so I came back to the lab on Monday and realized that there was fungal infection in each well plate with my samples. The problem with fungal infection is that you can’t save any samples. Fungi produce spores which spread everywhere as soon as you open the lid. So I had to throw all of them away. There was one plate that looked ok, so I did use it for Live/dead analysis. Overall I wasn’t very happy with the set up and how I prepared all my samples, I would have to repeat part of the experiment anyway.

[Picture - view from my office]

In addition, after I thaw down some of the cells for future use I realized that they also got infected this time with bacteria. I was quite disappointed and sad, as I wasn’t sure what is happening. I know how to do cell culture, everything was fine for 6 months and now I infect everything like a newbie. Well it appears to be a bigger problem. Apart from me infecting the samples, other people started to get infections too. So I guess we might have something going on in the lab. Our lab technicians closed our incubator for cleaning and we all actively sterilized our safety cabinets.

Last Friday I thawed a few more cells and luckily they look ok. I will use some of them tomorrow as I will prepare an alamar blue experiment. This time I will be doing everything much slower. I would like to do Live/dead too, but next week I am going away for three days, so I will need to rely on someone to feed my cells and I don’t want to prepare too many samples in case if something goes wrong. Plus, I don’t want to overload another person with work. Oh, by the way we (CDT) students are going for a bioreactors course in Keele university, so it should be quite interesting.

That’s all for now. I am starting to think about writing my blogs twice a week as I am getting busier and I think that once a week I can’t really write a lot, but let’s see I need to be more or less consistent with them anyway. :)