Day in the Life of a Research Assistant

Hello and welcome to the day in the life of a research assistant. Today, I'm doing an introic culture study and I'm also doing some other tasks for another study as well. I'll explain more about it later, but I always start my day by checking my emails. Okay, just ignore my ripped glove, but anyway, before I collect my sample, I like to prepare all of my reagents, my ice boxes, and surgical materials. And this is only my second time doing introic culture. I have basically no experience on culturing cells or maintaining them and that's why I have to keep practicing. And right now, I'm preparing two ice boxes, one to keep the sample in and the other one is for the cell culture room. These specific reagents have to be kept on ice before use, so I'm separating it into different tubes to make my life easier later on. And also, I have learned that it's so important to label everything. I like to label both the tube and its lid. The first time I did the introic study, I didn't have the tubes prepared and had to run around trying to figure out things last minute. And because the experiment is so time sensitive, I had to make sure that this time I was extra prepared. After I fill up the tubes, I put them on ice right away to keep them cold. To one of the tubes, I am adding antibiotic that will protect the cells from any pathogens. Also, it's really important to mix very thoroughly because that's where I might have messed up the first time I did the study. Now, I'm preparing the reagents that do not need to be kept on ice. I think this is tissue dissociation reagent. It's not really necessary to do this now, but like I said, I wanted to be prepared. In the cell culture room, everything has to be clean, so I'm constantly cleaning my hands, my lab coat, and basically everything I bring into the room. To put this all into perspective, I'm preparing my materials in the lab, but I will collect my specimen in the animal facility that is about a six minute walk. So I need to make sure that I grab my tweezers, scissors, a surgical pad before I head down there. It was literally so hot and I was dying by the time I got there. Also, the icebox was dripping for some reason. I think it had a leak, so I was just struggling to get down there. Anyway, I'm dressing up right now, making sure I got the proper PPE before I head into the animal room and collect my sample. Now, this is kind of unfortunate, but I had prepped for the surgery and everything, but someone was using the dissection room until 12 p.m and it was only 10 a.m, so I had no choice but to walk into the heat and go back to the lab. But in the end, it's okay because I took this opportunity to eat lunch knowing that I'll be too busy to eat later. And yes, I'm eating ramen. It was leftover from yesterday's dinner, which happens to be the same thing that I was eating last time I filmed a video about this job. I was also eating ramen. I swear, I eat other stuff. It's just a big coincidence. About an hour later, I went back to the animal facility, which was a really hot walk. It wasn't time to do the surgery yet, so I just went ahead and worked on my other study. It was super easy. I just had to measure the body weight of some mice, their food intake, and also replace their food. And by the time I finished, the surgery room was finally empty. Guys, this is only the second time I've ever performed a dissection. In high school and undergrad, I never had a chance to dissect anything like they do in the movies, so I don't really know what I'm doing, but at the same time, I do. I also never took anatomy, so I always forget like what is what in the digestive system. But today, I'm extracting the duodenum, and I'm low-key kind of guessing like where it is. Also, sorry, I forgot to put a trigger warning on this, but yeah. Now that I'm sitting here watching this, I realized how scary it was that I didn't say a single word for like a couple hours of me doing this. I didn't talk to anybody. Anyway, I'm just cleaning out any fecal matter, making sure that basically I'm only left with the duodenum and no poopies. After I clean up, I'm just gonna head back to the lab and clean out the intestine more and more. So I'm doing this by putting it back into that stuff that I was pouring in the beginning. That cleans it up, and then I'll put it in the tissue reagent and put it on this little rocker thing. So I left the sample in the little rocker thingy for about 15 minutes, and during these 15 minutes, I walked back to the animal lab to get my backpack because I left it there. Then I went back to the lab, grabbed the sample, and now I'm washing it again. Basically, what I do for the rest of the experiment is try to clean the sample as much as possible before I isolate the cells. The sample is going back to the tissue dissociation reagent, and I'm gonna put it back on the rocker. And while I'm waiting for that to sit, I'm going to go and enter data that I collected earlier from the study. I'm basically just punching all the numbers into Excel. What's even funnier is that I actually have no laboratory experience. When I was in undergrad, I was involved with a lab, but it was more about studying people and students and learning techniques. It wasn't anything like an actual laboratory setting. So the only real experience I have is from doing like genetics lab or mammology lab or things like that. So taking this job was a really big learning curve for me. Right now, I'm taking an aliquot to see how many cells I have, and I only saw maybe like three or four, which is not good. Last time, I saw over 50, so I think I messed up somewhere. I'm just centrifuging it to see if anything will settle down, and unfortunately, when I took it out of the machine, I see nothing. See, there's like nothing, and maybe the sample was too diluted. So I'm going to split it up into smaller falcon tubes and see if something will settle if it's a smaller volume. After centrifuging it the second time, I still didn't see anything at the bottom, but you can kind of see some teeny, teeny, tiny cells like dispersed throughout the sample. So I went ahead and just kept going forward. So now, I'm sucking up all the supernatant with this vacuum, and I'll be adding things like media, adding a little matri-gel so that it will stick to the culture dish. Yeah, a bunch of science-y stuff. Last time, I had way too many cells, so I was like, oh, this time I'll need to do better calculations, but since I barely have any cells this time, I'm not even going to do calculations. I'm just going to use like the whole sample. Now, I'm putting the sample in a 24-well plate, but I'm not using all 24. I'm only using eight. Then, I'm checking to see what they look like, and they are there. I see some cells, but it's not that many, which had me a little concerned, but I'm going to put them in the incubator for about 15 minutes to allow the gel to kind of harden. Now, this is one of the most important steps that I didn't do well last time, was giving the cells media, which will help them survive. It's their food, basically. At this point, I was really tired because I was doing this all day, and also, I lost hope because I felt like I really messed up the experiment. Like, I know it's just for practice, but for some reason, I still felt really, really down about it. In a second, I'll show you guys what the results are of this study versus the first study I did. So, this is the first one. As you can see, it's super crowded, and this is the one from today. There's basically nothing in there. You can just see a couple. I'm going to put these in the incubator, and I'll show you guys what it looks like about six days later. I actually successfully cultured only three, but I still felt so happy about those three. After I'm done, I like to clean everything and put up my jacket. I literally finished just on time. Thank you for watching my video, guys. I'll see you next time.