Tissue Morphodynamics Labratory: Week 1

The first day at my lab was largely uneventful and somewhat stressful at first. Jacky's lab didn't start until 10, so he was kind enough to help me find my lab. We went to the Engineering Quad assuming that my P.I. was still working there, but was told that she moved to Hoyt Laboratory. One man at the Engineering Quad kindly directed Jacky and me towards Hoyt and said that it was relatively close to Frick's Chemistry Lab. As we walked towards the general direction of Hoyt, we asked a man walking out of Frick's if he knew where Hoyt was. After some deliberation, he pointed us towards the "new chemistry lab," which ended up being the wrong place. Then a man coming out of the new lab pointed us back towards Frick's. Eventually we ended up looking up Hoyt on our phones and realized it was about a good twenty steps from where we asked the first gentleman for directions. That adventure lasted for about 30 minutes before I arrived at the lab.

The rest of the day was spent reading articles and reviews from past graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other labs in order to further understand tissue development in chicken and murine lungs. I met the research specialist that would be teaching me the multiple techniques, Amira, as well as an undergraduate student, Ben. Both were very welcoming the first day, although they clearly had a lot of work to do. The following day started off with more papers to read but ended with a demonstration of chicken embryo dissection. Although I wasn’t able to dissect or extract the chicken embryo, it was nonetheless interesting to watch Amira microdissect the chicken embryo with such ease and extract a chicken lung from the mess of tissue. The next three days were filled with more articles and I got through about 10 articles, 5 reviews, 1 graduate student’s dissertation, as well as Turing's Chemical Overview of Morphogenesis over the course of the week. The last one took almost two days because its complex math and formulas.  Next week, after I receive my lab safety training, I will start practicing dissections in order to competently prepare chicken lungs for experiments.