(no subject)

[exsequar]

So I thought I'd show you guys a bit of what I'm doing at my internship every day. I work with a video microscope so I'm able to capture images of the blood vessels I work with.

So this is a vein that I worked on this morning. It's taken from the intestine of a rat, and this image was taken after it was all cleaned of the fat and everything (that was the skill that I took longest to get a hang of, but I'm a total pro now! \o/)



Then I treated it with increasing doses of the hormone endothelin, which causes it to contract, and it ended up like this:


If anyone's curious about the details, feel free to ask me questions! :)

Comments

[jamesinclair.livejournal.com]

I see what you do, but dont understand why you do it. As in, the vein is cleaned...now what?

[exsequar.livejournal.com]

The "now what" part is the change between the two pictures. I gave it increasing doses of that drug and studied the percent contraction at each concentration. We're studying how veins and arteries differ in their reactions to this drug, and what happens in veins of rats genetically engineered to lack a specific drug receptor on the veins.