My New Worm Pets! -Week 1

My first day at CHOP started out soggy and gloomy, but once I reached the tenth floor of the Abramson building and entered Dr. Falk's lab, I met two other friendly students working in Dr. Falk's lab for the summer (just to remind you I'm working in Dr. Falk's lab who works with Mitochondrial Disease at CHOP). Anyway, where was I? ...oh yeah so Fred, an undergrad at Penn, had been working in the lab during the school year as well and has a lot of experience with techniques and material in the lab. Rebecca, an undergrad at Notre Dame, very recently arrived at the lab and was in my shoes exactly a week ago. Before I could get my hands dirty in the lab, I had to learn the basics about mitochondria and about the subject of our experimentation, C. elegans. Essentially C. elegans is a 1 millimeter long, transparent worm which feeds on bacteria, typically E. coli. Fred told me that I will be working with two strains of C. elegans, N2 and Gas-1. The N2 strain is the wild type meaning it is the normal, healthy strain which has nothing wrong with it. The Gas-1 strain has a malfunctioning Complex 1 (a part of the electron transport chain in the inner membrane of the mitochondria). He also taught me how to pour agar plates (on which the worms and bacteria grow) and how to spread bacteria on the plates (the food for the worms) as I watched Rebecca do both. Fred also taught me how to use the dishwasher and the autoclave in case I ever ran out of clean glassware during my experiment. Then Julian, with whom I will doing my project since he is the life-span expert (the focus of my project), gave me my own worms to play with. He asked me to try to transfer them from plate to plate using his pick, which is essentially a rod with an extremely thin platinum wire at the end. From experience Julian told me that beginners usually kill their worms within a few days and tear holes in their agar plates but after a few hours of practicing I got the hang of it.

Here's a picture of my first ever plate:

The little lines you see are actually the ridges I made with the pick by accident when I tried to pick up and put down the worms, don't get too excited! The worms are much smaller and are very difficult to see with the naked eye...especially in this picture... sorry! Maybe if you zoom in?

My third plate:

You can see this one is much clearer and less damaged in comparison to my first plate. Woo hoo!! I made progress! I'm not a worm-killer anymore! The big blob in the middle is bacteria which the worms eat.

By the fourth day in, I have my own bench space, my own box of worms in the incubator with my name on it (yay!!), a lot more knowledge about C. elegans and the Philadelphia mass-transit system (phew!) and some awesome "colleagues" as Zsoka calls us :)

I hope everyone else at their lab is having fun and learning a lot too!

-Rhea