Week 2: They have neat toys in NYC

The Nikon Biostation:  An automated cell culture imaging system that can take images of cell culture plates at scheduled time periods in both brightfield and in fluorescent spectra. Images taken from product website.
 This week I got to live a life of luxury for a tissue engineer. I started out my fabricating organoids for the primary human umbilical vein endothelial cells and the immortalized lymphatic endothelial cells that I have been growing in 2D monocultures for the last week. They turned out great and my lab was really grateful to have someone specializing in 3D tissue cultures to add a robustness to their research that they didn't have the skills to do on their own. If these cells were grown in the right conditions, they have the potential to form vessel-like structures through self organization. Normally at home in Ithaca, that would mean I would check my organoids multiple times a day, taking pictures of every well every time. In a 96-well plate full of samples this takes a lot of time! Lucky for me, the Cancer Research Center in the Belfer building has a Nikon Biostation (shown above). This neat tool is a high-tech cell incubator and brightfield and fluorescent microscope all in one. And did I mention it's automated, so you put in your plate of cells and come back only to change the media and collect the files! I am way more excited about this than I should be, but as a young researcher who has already devoted far too many hours to tedious imaging studies THIS BIOENGINEERED DEVICE IS A GODSEND. I really enjoyed using it this week to do hourly z-stack brightfield microscopy over a three day period to see how the cells were organizing in my organoids over time. The images I took weren't the best, but I am hopeful that with a little troubleshooting the biostation will provided me with a lot of really critical information that I wouldn't be able to obtain in my lab in Ithaca.

This week I mostly spend time in the lab, but I also met with my clinical mentor, Dr. Ajay Gupta. He is a neuroradiologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital, although most of his time is spent doing research on MRI. He was kind enough to give me a tour of the MRI imaging suite in the basement of the hospital and introduced me to several radiologists and technicians so that I could come back and watch them diagnose patients another time. Although MRI is not my most prefered area of medicine, I am grateful to now have this opportunity to be exposed to MRI if I choose to do so.



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