“Ok, so is everybody clear - any questions?” It was a nice thing of my lab professor to ask - I appreciated the fact that he checked in with the zeitgeist of our knowledge midway through our four hour lab marathon. In my mind, I responded: “I do have a question - but it’s of a rather general nature. What’s that? I should ask it? Oh, ok … what the crappin’ heck is going on?”

It wasn’t that the fluorescent antibody tagging system used in FACS was all that complex. You have your cells. You want to know something about them. You have something that sticks to certain antigens on certain cells and lights up while doing the sticking … and there you go. No, the underlying concepts were not the problem. Neither was his explanation of those concepts. It was the practical application: I spent 15 minutes pipetting dye into vials and then into other vials that had been spun down earlier, which had in turn been prepared from the crushed spleen and/or lymph nodes of a recently euthanized and dissected lab mouse. It was only after I was pipetting for 14 of the 15 minutes that I finally realized what was going into what and where it came from. Usually there comes a point in a lab where you hold it all in your head and it makes sense. In this case, though, I’d think I had it and then bam he’s drawing this massive table of antibodies and their addition to tubes. “I am flummoxed,” I said to myself.

Everybody was doing something during the lab, there were a couple of looks around the room of “…?!” and in the end I think folks were doing the right stuff, but my goodness was it random. Later in the semester, we do our own experiments - let’s hope things make more sense then.

• Biology
• Lab
• University of St. Thomas

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