Cells

Here is what I spent doing for most of this afternoon. Taking immunofluorescent images of human epithelial cells on our confocal microscope. Kudos if you know what the hell I'm going on about.

Anyway these cells are expressing a protein that fluoresces green under a certain wavelength of light (colored green in this image) and are stained with antibodies against a virus protein (red). Also stained is the cell DNA (coloured blue) in the nucleus of the cell, and the actin cytoskeleton (purple) - which acts as a scaffold for the cellular structure.

Basically what I'm trying to see, is that if the protein that gets made inside the cell gets transported to the outside of the cell quicker in certain conditions.

The experiment may be working, but it will require many more hours at the scope and some magical computational statistical analysis to come out with a yes/no answer.

Fingers crossed it does....