Images from Today

[gragathaz]

I was immensely stressed today. My well-laid plans yesterday were laid completely to waste when I discovered that my litre of cells was ready for culturing, which took priority over everything else that I had planned. As a result, though, I have some remarkable memories.

• scads of cells swimming around under the microscope
• scads of students milling about outside in exactly the same fashion
• one flask that contains ten billion cells [1,2]
• sixteen tubes of culture
• a full aspirator trap
• five-billion-cell centrifuge pellets [3]
• 50 ml of TriZol per tube [4,5]

I had a great time with all of this today, though, and lots of fun laughing with another molecular-biologist friend about some of the preposterously huge quantities of tiny things. Also, I got absolutely nothing at all done on the one thing that I really wanted to work on today. Ah, well.
Footnotes:

1. Say that again: Ten. Billion. Cells. That, my friends, is a lot. My advisor was surprised and impressed; he had never gotten these things to grow up so densely. I was very pleased.
2. I should point out that I was only counting the protists. There were at least several trillion bacterial cells in my culture as well. The mind boggles.
3. It is not every day that one can estimate one's cell culture mass in grams. That is, as I have already said but will say again, a lot. The pellets were about a centimetre across. Quite possibly, they are the largest cell pellets ever achieved in the history of the department.
4. This is about as probable as bringing four hundred pounds of meatloaf to the average-sized potluck. Nobody uses that much TriZol.
5. It looks disturbingly similar to fruit punch. Keep in mind, though, should you ever be in the position to witness 50 ml of TriZol, that the stuff is about as healthy to drink as nail polish remover. It probably tastes worse, too.