Today I mainly worked with Sarah to continue growing organoids in the tissue culture lab to be able to insert them into mice to observe their growth and test different drugs on them to observe their responses. Sarah and I finished up plating the organoids that were left and after that was finished, we began to log data (a lot of what we did was digital data analysis) for the organoids before testing her drug—labeled 119 on the mice. I also got to go with Dr. Hsu to order thirty mice for this next wave of experiments with them. Today was mainly a research and data analysis day to finish up any pre-requisite steps to testing the mice. But for the past few days, we’ve mainly been working on the same thing— growing organoids and plating them to be ready for the mice. The reason why we have to do this over several days is because organoid growth doesn’t occur slowly, but it doesn’t occur rapidly either. If we put the organoids in an environment where they would rapidly grow, they would be diluted with fibroblasts (I talked about these in a previous post), and thus the sample wouldn’t be usable for the purpose of our research outside of the mouse. So it’s a little bit of a lengthy and slow process while there’s not much we can do other than pre-lab data analysis.
