Week 2 - Friday July 13th, 2012 - Headway on our Expt!

It's Friday the 13th and today our pedagogy meeting was canceled so Valerie and I headed back to the lab and finally started making some real headway!

It's about time I give you an overview on what we are doing.

Our lab has developed a machine, the IRIS, that shots a ray of LED light at a very small nano-chip. By comparing the way the light bounces off of the chip both before and after a substance has been adhered to the chip - we can determine how much of this substance is present. The idea is in the near future, to be able to put a drop of blood on a chip coated with anitbodies for different viruses. If the blood has any of the viruses, it will adhere to the antibody for that virus and change the interference pattern of the LED light.  The IRIS can analyze this change and therefore run a test that could diagnose a patient with any number of viruses at once.

Currently, Valerie and I are working at finding an antibody we can place on the chip that will adequately capture the H1N1 flu virus. We spent several days doing online and telephone research and leg-work to find an antibody that looks promising and has been testing in similar experiments to ours (antibodies cost $500 for a VERY TINY amount so we can't just test them willy-nilly). While we are waiting for the antibodies we finally ordered to come in, we decided to test an antibody George already had.

We purified the antibody George had on-hand and spotted it on the chip. Then after a pre-wash, wash, and block we added the flu virus! Here is a picture of our chip incubating in the H1N1 virus (we're hoping this virus will stick to the antibody we added earlier).

To test if this antibody works to actually catches the flu we imaged the chip with the antibody pre-virus (a control) and then the chip with the antibody after the viral incubation. We will compare these images and analyze this data next week, at which point I will be able to tell you then more about how we will measure our results.  If this antibody doesn't succeed we will try again with the ones we ordered online!

To the right is a picture of the low-mag IRIS we used to take images of the chip. And below(the green image) is a post-scan we took after the viral incubation.




As the summer progresses our work will broaden. Once we find an antibody that works to capture H1N1 (if we find an antibody that works!) we will analyze data both with a high-mag single particle IRIS and with a new, more user-friendly, NSF-AIR. If we are getting consistent results from both we will help the lab provide evidence that the NSF-AIR machine is a reliable way to gather data. I will write much more about this process when we get there!

See the barely there blurry little circles? Those are our spots - this is where we put the antibody. I can't tell yet if virus actually adhered yet - but we will learn this next week so I will keep you updated!!!

Now it's time to start my weekend!