lab.

I spend A LOT of my time in the lab - Honours is my life! I'm at uni in the lab or the office from 8.30am - at least 5pm everyday. Most days it ends up being 5.30 or 6, but on a wednesday I am in the lab til all hours of the night. It varies between 9pm and midnight, every wednesday! It is insane! Oh and then there is when I am doing an experiment that takes a few days and I start it late in the week...yes that's right, I have been known to be in the lab on a saturday too! And this time schedule is only going to get worse as the year progresses and D-day (thesis due date) creeps ever closer!

So...since I am here all the time...and have lots of time to kill on a wednesday night while cells are growing and doing what they do best....I took some photos to blog!


This is my desk, in the corner of our massive students office. Chels might recognize the calender she made me (it comes in handy Chels!)

The far end of the room where my desk is, in front of the window.

The other side of the room where Nath and Lila reside.

This is in our main, general use laboratory. This bench runs through the middle of the lab and is like this on the other side of it too. Each area is someones designated work area.

This is the chemical weigh area - where we make up solutions and mixtures of things from all the diffferent chemicals.

The western area (western blot - a procedure I do often). I spend a lot of time in this area


The other side of the bench down the middle of the room.  My work area is opposite the first green stool.

This is my work area...

and my stash of chemicals and stuff I use often

The fume hood
- where we use chemicals that you just wouldn't want to inhale... or if they smell nasty, which a lot of them do!

The glassware storage area

The turning rig.

This little room is where I spend my wednesday nights. What I do is during the day dissect out neurons (nerve cells) from rats and culture them, or grow them in media that they like, a cocktail of chemicals that they like to grow in. And then after a few hours, I image them on this.

The microscope is what allows the cells to be visualised. It is hooked up to a camera, which is attached to a tv monitor which reads the analogue signal, and then converts it to a digital signal to a computer. An image is taken every seven seconds for half an hour, making a movie of the neuron, and what it does.

We "puff" substances at the neurons that they are either attracted to a repulsed from, and we can quantify this respone by the length and angle at which the cells grow. To puff something at them, we use tiny tiny pipettes that are made from very fine glass and have an opening of 1.0µm (which is a 1000th of a mm - so very very small). The substance is able to be puffed because it is hooked up to a nitrogen tank which has controlled pressure to push out the substance.

It is all very complex, and lots of things hooked up to other things, but it works and works consistently! So all is good :-)

Here we have a neuron cell body (circle at the bottom), from which extends an axon (the straight line) and on the end of the axon is a growth cone, these cool structures that feel around and extend little projections and decide where they are going to move to and extend the neuron to! These little fellas help all of the neurons in the nervous system end up in the locations that they need to, and allow individual neurons to connect to each other and form neural networks which forms the nervous system! It's amazing!

It's all very clever and amazing and every tiny little detail amazes me! The body is so so so very complex and complicated and we by no means understand much of it at all!

So I have to stay late on a wednesday, because once the nerve cells have been culture, they only live for a limited number of hours....8-10 hours....and so I have to image as many as possible before they die and are useless.

That's our lab, the laboratory of molecular neurobiology of the University of Tasmania and the Menzies Research Institute, and one of the things that I do regularaly - there are many other protocols and procedures that I do as well, this is just one of them!