I realised that I have 1 year and 9 months until completion of my PhD and on CDT you are not allowed to get extension so you HAVE to finish all the experiments and write up everything within given timeframe. At this stage I manage to produce fibres that look very nice and don’t have any beads in them but all cells still die on them. I also didn’t quite managed to get a proper vasculature development yet and I believe there is something wrong with cells. I just bought a new lot of cells but I need to transfect them. Honestly, I’m getting kind of desperate so I think I’ll most likely just buy some fluorescent dye that stains either a membrane or cytoplasm. The drawback of those is that they are not long lasting as when cells divide the intensity of the stain will fade. But I hope it would be enough for 2 week long experiments. I’m seriously worried as how I’m going to defend myself on the viva as things that are quite straightforward are not working out for some reason. All my supervisors seem to be happy with my progress or they might not care to that extent as I do. I hope this year will be productive. Here are he pictures of how my MSCs look. The left cells are the ones that have been transfected with GFP while on the right are cells that were just bought.
In the next 2 months, I will spend 4 weeks at Central Laser Facility in Harwell, Oxfordshire where we will be using light sheet microscopy. One of my supervisors is extremely eager to get it done, but the proposal was written for another experiment by a guy who has left university and joined the company. Since the proposal was accepted we have to somehow use the time. Today I had almost 2-hour meeting with my supervisors, discussing possible experiments and there are few that we could do. I’m just worried that as always everything will die on the fibres, I will spend 4 weeks away and will not get any data. This has happened before on one of the beamtimes at Diamond Light Source. On another topic, there is a good thing, I could possible get an extra grant to do a few extr
a experiments. As part of CDT we need to do Innovation & Commercialisation of Research unit where we had to develop a business idea related to our projects and pitch it. So, I proposed an idea and a panel really liked it, so I got an email saying that If I apply I will get up to 2500 GBP to do some experiments or go for training, conferences etc. Which is a good this for your CV. I had a meeting with UMIP (University of Manchester Intellectual Property) and they seemed to be happy for me to go forward. So, let’s see how this unwinds. Oh, another good thing is that I got a publication. Here is the link if you are interested, its open access so anyone can have a look. :)
Some people asked me why list of authors is so big. It’s because it’s done together with Japan, France and UK, so a lot of people were involved and all the project leaders have to be on it. The first author is always the person who did most of the work while the last is the main supervisor on the publication. So, students want to be first while supervisors last :)