FIVE AND SIX

Here's some piggy choromosomes - cuties.

(I snapchatted them)

So I thought I’d join up these last two weeks, mostly because Week 5 was pretty much a repeat of the previous week (and, like in Week 4, the probes didn’t work – trying them again this week so fingers crossed!). Mini excursions of the last two weeks include: taking a nice little trip up to the Tissue Culture lab for some nanodropping for the Genomiphi (very fancy with their double doors and lots of light) and also going on a lovely expedition to stores to stock up on stock-making stuff which was fun :P.

Pam Genomiphi-ing

Two loads of ovaries have arrived and hopefully a good bit of fertilisation occurs (so that I get to play with the micromanipularator more). Managed to do quite a bit of embryo biopsy these last two weeks which was exciting as ever (and still requires me to go “pew pew” everytime I use the laser (and slightly disturb Evi in the process.

Cooperative little blastocyst coming out of the hole I just blasted

These little spermies didn't want to leave

Evi’s been busy writing up her Masters thesis so I’ve been doing some of the fiddly IVFy bits that she normally does like getting all the cumulous cells off of the (maybe-)zygotes. Did lots of media-making again the last two weeks (definite Media Queen) and the pH meter and myself are starting to accept one another, which is lovely. Last week I found a new favourite job (ok, slight exaggeration) – making stock. Mixing up powders and water and then aliquoting the stuff into hundreds of little eppendorfs and then writing on them really teeny-tinily is apparently my idea of a good time, who knew. Seriously relaxing, who needs spas? I managed to leave the freezer slightly open (everything was still frozen, as were the doors…shut.) so had to go on a little expedition to find homes for everything that was in there so that the thing could be defrosted (and then had to search for stuff while making the rest of the media. What a mission.) Silly me!

Evi posing with "milkshake" (i.e. Piggy sperm)

To get the oocytes out of the ovaries we use this fancy aspirator (hoover with a needle). One of my jobs this week was to figure out how much difference using the different settings makes as well as if the different gauge needles actually have much of an effect on the overall suckage. Has been great telling people that I spent the day “weighing water” – science J.

Spending the end of the week filling out forms and results before going to V-Fest, woohoo!