Archive for the ‘fluorescence’ Category

Solar1

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

The BioBus visited the amazing Solar1 today! If you live in NYC and haven’t been there before, it is at 23rd Street right on the East River and you should definitely visit. They have a beach!! And a building with a roof entirely made of solar panels. Thanks Colin and Chris for bringing the bus in there. With their help I am going to develop a  renewable energy and ecology curriculum for the BioBus.

 

Gabriella's Beautiful Micrograph

Gabriella's Beautiful Micrograph

While there, we had some very nice visitors. First Tim, an NYU ecology student, Susan, a teacher at the Columbia School, and Joan and her daughter Gabriella, a student at the Earth School, came for a tour of the bus. Gabriella already had her microscope operator’s license, and she jumped right in, showing us the different parts of the microscope and then taking some very nice images of DNA and cytoplasm of some cells. One of her images is shown here.

 

Colin then gave me a tour of the park, which, as I mentioned, has a beach! It is really beautiful and when the tide is low the beach is even bigger and nicer, according to Colin. When we got back to the bus, John, a teacher at City-As-School, along with a group of his students, were checking out the bus. They had been on a walking tour of the city, and heard the rumor that the BioBus was in town, so they stopped by. We had a really nice conversation about the history of the project and then toured the lab and watched some cell movies. If I am lucky some of those students might do an internship with the BioBus, which would be very neat. I was really impressed by how nice that group of students were, I really hope that some of them get involved with the project.

 

Colin and Tim Looking at the Receding Cloud Front

Colin and Tim Looking at the Receding Cloud Front

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Frederick Douglas Academy III

Friday, December 12th, 2008

The BioBus just finished an amazing week at FDA III in the Bronx. On the first day, we brought all of the 10th grade students through the bus. The rest of the week we brought interested students from the first day back to the bus for a day of lab work. In the lab work we had two major goals – first, to figure out the nature of the bright spots in the hoechst labeling (labels DNA) of our fixed cells, and second to identify and make movies of some locally collected cells. For now, I will post one image and one movie, but soon I will make a new page with all of the hypotheses and data that the students came up with over the week.

Hoechst (DNA, blue) and phalloidin (actin cytoskeleton, green)

Hoechst (DNA, blue) and phalloidin (actin cytoskeleton, green). Sample prep by Tomas, microscopy by Wilson & analysis by Bo and Chris.


 

Dividing Bacteria from Crotona Park Pond. (Movie is in real time). Made by Princess and Taccara (P&T Productions).

Posted in bacteria, cells, events, fluorescence, schools | 6 Comments »

First Fluorescence

Friday, December 5th, 2008

No, I’m not talking about the birth of food production in the Fertile Crescent (can you tell I’ve been reading Guns, Germs, and Steel?), I’m talking about the first digital images of fluorescence taken on the BioBus. The generous donations of a camera from Edmund Optics along with a lens adapter from Olympus have enabled us to start making still pictures, time-lapse sequences, and video-rate movies of cells. Below is one of the first composite images I took with the camera. Composite means that the picture is actually two images added together: the blue shows where DNA is and the green shows filaments of actin protein. These filaments form a spider’s web-like network in the cell’s cytoplasm that allow the cell to do things like move and eat. Each blob of blue is the DNA of a different cell. Do you count 6 separate blobs?

Green actin with blue DNA

Green actin with blue DNA

The microscope slide I used to make this picture was donated to the BioBus by Tomas Perez at Columbia University. Tomas uses fluorescently labeled cells in his research to let him track the whereabouts of certain proteins inside the cell. For instance, in the above image you see that the blue stained DNA is located at the center of the green-stained cytoplasmic network of actin. Do you know why DNA stays in the center of the cell and doesn’t spread out into the cytoplasm? Hint: it starts with the letter ‘N’.

These cells came from petri dishes that Tomas keeps full of so called ‘immortalized’ mouse cells. Immortalized means that these cells can grow forever on a petri dish, without ever needing to be in a mouse again! Tomas then chemically ‘froze’ or fixed the cells in place, after which he stained the cell with special chemicals designed to recognize only certain cell structures (in this case the structures of DNA and actin filaments) and make them glow. This is like putting fluorescent colored clothes on certain parts of the cell and then shining a black light on it, like you might do at a party! And believe me, cells CAN dance.

Our ability to take digital fluorescent images is also exciting since we are working on a grant to fund building a large library of fixed and stained samples for the BioBus in order to see all the different organelles and structures (like mitochondria and ribosomes). We can also look for differences between cells from different places. Perhaps student-researchers aboard the BioBus will discover a difference between cancer and non-cancerous cells? It’s not impossible.

If you are a scientist and you have fluorescently-labeled samples you would like to donate to the BioBus, please contact me (ben@biobus.org). We currently have filter cubes for UV, GFP, and Rhodamine excitable dyes.

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