Today was my first solo experience on the electron microscope in our lab, and I wanted to tell the internet all about it! My postdoc position is so much different than what I did in grad school that most of the time I feel like a rotation student. But my mentor now trusts me to use the half-million dollar scope by myself! I should give credit. Our resident expert, Joy, was there to answer my bajillion questions and help me to remember how to turn on the scope (it works better when it's powered up). But then I took pictures by myself! I was looking for vGLUT1 labeled synapses (no, it doesn't matter to you what that is, so I won't explain), but I took some photos of other things that looked neat too!
All the images are from the rat striatum, but I will also be moving into human tissue soon. These are not really the best examples, because I made lots of changes to the images on my computer in the exposure and whatnot to make the images more appealing to folks that don't do EM. They are a glimpse into what I'm up to when I go to a lab and work for an entire day! Science!
I learned that incorrect focus will drive your life into the toilet fast. I'm not even kidding.
The type of images I was going for (sort of):
These are myelinated axons and fiber bundles. It's amazing how high a resolution we can get on something so little. Now that I can begin to recognize structures, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the wrong stuff just because it's *pretty*.
More bundles and axons, and to the right a nucleus. I won't begin to guess what type of cell, but it's most assuredly a nucleus. The black blobs in the nucleus are condensed DNA, chromatin. Neat, yes?
So that's mostly what I did this afternoon. I'm somewhat paranoid that if my mentor looks on my blog she might comment that all of my captions are wrong. But you get the picture, so to speak.
Happy Thursday!
How cool is that? You had a much more productive day than I did.
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