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[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

[nebulein.livejournal.com]

(Hee, I love it as well. I think it was in a big (and beautiful) spn bases batch gsd82 posted in some icon community a while ago.)

How do they get killed?

So the vein can be alive or dead? Is that like the chicken that's flying around the kitchen with its head already chopped off? (I'm really wondering about the name of the nurtient solution. Dunno if you know it, but in German 'Krebs' means cancer.) So you wait until they kill the rat, then do the experiment, clean up, maybe wait for another rat, do the whole stuff again, and wait until you can go home. Sounds like a fun day...
How long do you work each day? And for how much longer? Are you going to come back after the internship? Did you know before what you were going to do? Were you squirmish at all about working with rats or body parts in general? (I'm assuming you probably weren't since you seemed pretty cool about it. I sure know it would take me some time to get used to. ^^)

I see. Is your supervisor back by now? Oh boy, so many questions. I'm sorry, once I get curious it's hard to stop myself, and I realized I really don't know much about what you're doing all day long ^^

[exsequar.livejournal.com]

Questions questions! Whew! *g*

They give them an injection that kills them painlessly. It's basically like falling to sleep for them.

The vein has to be alive - and by alive I mean the cells that cause the contractions have to still be alive. So it remains alive outside of the body for about a day. I use the same intestine twice during the day, so after I'm done with my first experiment I just get the intestine out of the freezer and get the next blood vessel. Krebs I believe was the name of a scientist... we also have part of photosynthesis named after him, the Krebs Cycle. Thats weird about the word in German!

I work about 8 hours a day, depending on the schedule of the people giving me rides. I've just started my 3rd week, and I'm working for 10 weeks total. I'm not sure if I'll be coming back - if he offers me a position again for another summer, I'll have to think about it. I didn't have a concrete idea of what I was going to be doing before I got here, nope. I'm not squeamish at all - I dissected a cat in high school and thought that was the coolest thing EVER. Sometimes I think that I should be disgusted or something when I'm watching them cut up the animals, but I'm just not o.O Well at least I've got that requirement down if I wanna be a scientist!

[nebulein.livejournal.com]

Krebs I believe was the name of a scientist... we also have part of photosynthesis named after him, the Krebs Cycle. Thats weird about the word in German!
"it's what we call ironic"

a cat? oh wow. we dissected a fish once, but i preferred to walk around school and talk to some other kids wo didn't want to stay in the room. (we had open doors day, so kids that were considering going to our school were running around and visiting classes, i think we scared quite some of them away *lol*) couldn't really stand the smell. i never wanted to know what was going on in my body. i'm sure you'll be a great scientist.

and sorry for asking so many holes into you, thanks for answering and explaning everything so patiently. i'll stop now ^^;