We're finally done with the project this week! Its kind of a bittersweet thing, as my partner and I really enjoyed doing this project, but we're happy we got it done. "We spent a lot of time making the documents and doing the actual experimenting, and we're finally seeing the home stretch." It would be really cool if any publications actually picked up our paper, but I don't really expect it. I think that what we did really lends itself well to having multiple different kinds of experiments done to either confirm our results or expand upon them. One of the experiments that I would like to do would be one very similar to ours, but in 10% increments of rations with 2 wells each. This would give us a much better average of our data, and enable us to better pin down a good ratio of stem cells to cancer cells. Another experiment that could build on our findings would be trying to do the same thing with different kinds of cancer and stem cells. In terms of project and personal goals, I think that we made most of them. We got solid results for our experiment, and we learned a lot about stem cells, cancer cells, and other microbiology during that time. On a personal level, I'm pretty happy that I learned as much as I did, and I think that I understand most, if not all of the stuff we did in class. I would like to get more of a grounding in biology, since that might be what I major in in college. As a project, I would have liked to get some more data, but I'm good with what we got. ***UPDATE*** Attached is a copy of our final research paper. Oof.
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Weebly is being weird and not allowing me to upload photos right now, I'll try to upload later.
This week, we finished the data collection for our experiment! Once we had taken pictures of them and switched the media, we had to kill them, which Garrett and I were kind of sad about, but it was all for science. We had to kill them in order to stain the cells to get an accurate count of both stem cells and cancer cells. While we were looking at the photos we took during data collection, we were surprised by the varying confluency in the cells. This may have been caused by the delay in feeding times, but we're not sure. That was one aspect of our data that we expected to be pretty constant, so that was a shocker. I would honestly like to attempt the experiment again if I had actually let it grow over the course of only three days. Due to time restrictions and limits on hood use, we weren't able to take our data three days in a row. I think that would have given us much better results than what we have. I also would have really liked to do more specific concentration, like 10% increments instead of 25% increments. I would really like to see the results from that experiment, but that's just idle hoping. After the break, we should be able to start our data analysis in full. Happy Thanksgiving folks! This week, my partner and I fed our cells in the media and got almost all of our qualitative data. I’m really excited that we managed not to kill our cells, and the little dudes are pretty confluent in the wells. Since we're using the same media foray of our plates, it made it pretty easy to feed them. I think that we’re going to get pretty good data on the qualitative side, but I’m a little concerned about our cell counts. When we used the hemocytometer, we got very little live cells, and we were worried that our cells were all dead. Another thing that might skew our data is the fact that we have paper towel fibers in our wells. Next week our next step is to analyze all of our data thoroughly and organize our spreadsheet. By Monday, I’m hoping to reorganize our sheet to make more sense to other people. My goal by Wednesday is to enter all the data in, and by Friday I want it all analyzed. These are kind of on a tight schedule, but I think we can get it done. I’m excited to be done with it, even though we’ve been having a good time. Quantitative Data Qualitative Data Today we finally began our experiment! I was super nervous, but I think we did pretty well with it. We had a lot of healthy cells in our wells at the end, and the picture to the right shows a magnified shot of our 6th plate, with 3.75 mLs of C2C12(undifferentiated mouse muscle stem cells) and 1.25 mLs of MyC-CaP(Mouse prostate cancer cells). The step we took today was only the first, but it was definitely the hardest. First, we took cells from inside the flasks, freed them from the bottom, and centrifuged those cells. After that, we disposed of the supernatant (the stuff on top) and re suspended the pellet(the stuff on the bottom) of cells into new media. We then put those in wells in our plate in varying amounts(look at our procedure for specifics). We were both very happy with our results, and we think that we did a good job. Our next step is to let them incubate for 24 hours, then document their growth. We're going to repeat that once(for solid data) and then dispose of them. We hope that the data we collect is going to benefit science, but my partner and I realize that it might be aiming too high. We're excited to see where our research takes us. Flowgram of our methods Our Calendar so far(look at end of October and Beginning of November) Updated Procedure
For the experiment, the first thing that we'll be doing is filling up our 6 wells on the plate with 5 milliliter samples of mouse cancer cells. Then, we're going to leave 3 wells of the plate alone, for our controls. After that, we're going to inject the remaining plates with 5, 3, and 1(respectively) milliliters of mouse stem cells. We're going to incubate the samples for 3 days total, taking pictures once a day, starting when we put them in the incubator. The goal of this whole process is to see and chart the growth of the cancer cells that are exposed to the stem cells, and document the changes.
Something that we've really been trying to figure out are some strategies that we can use to make sure we stay productive during the time that our cells are incubating. Our current plan is to try to analyze our current data, and when we can't do that, or are done doing that, refining our methods, introduction, and abstract to our paper. If we can't do that, we wanted to look into other research that may have answered our question, or done something similar to what we will be doing. We've been trying to come up with more concrete things, but that's what we have so far. -Procedure (current draft) -Introduction (current draft) This week, we started our stem cell project. We kicked it off by writing a preliminary introduction and methods in, and looking into what we want to do. I thought that when we saw the cells under the microscope, it was hella cool. The differentiation was a really interesting. We wanted to answer the question, "What do stem cells do to cancer cell growth?" We came about this question in a really roundabout way. From the beginning, we knew that we were going to work with cancer, but we didn't know what we wanted to do in particular. Then, in class, we did a lesson on the properties of stem cells. After that, we thought it would be interesting to see how the regenerative capabilities of stem cells interacted with the growth of cancer cells. The purpose of our project is to determine the effect of stem cells have on cancerous growths. My personal goals for this project are to develop a better sense of focus, and try to improve my scientific analyzation skills. I noticed last semester that I had lots of problems focusing on work if I was thinking about the scope of the project, or distracted by other problems I wanted to fix. This year, I want to aim to fix that in order to get better results in our experiment. I also wanted to improve my analyzing skills when I'm looking at scientific data/ evidence. I feel like I can do a lot better in my descriptions, and I could definitely pick up more details than what I currently do. ***EDIT*** Attached here is our work so far Introduction Research Proposal |
AuthorAlex (Zachary)Wessel ArchivesCategories |