Pat Quinn - Day 5

Things have been going well since my first day. Everyone has been very friendly and I am even getting my picture taken to be put on the website. I am still learning a lot about the different protocols within the lab but I am getting a grasp of many of them.

I learned that this summer I will be working on two projects. One project will be seeing the development of the lungs within chicken embryos. I will also be helping a post doc work on his project. He is trying to create a pressurized system that you can place mouse lungs into and you will be able to change the pressure so you can replicate a breathing pattern. The ultimate goal is to see what outside pressure has upon the development of lungs. We use mouse lungs instead of chicken lungs because mice are mammals.

So this week I practiced chicken dissections which I am getting better at. I can now successfully find the lungs but the tricky part now is separating the lungs from the digestive system because they overlap. With the lungs I have dissected I have begun the staining process which uses fluorescent tags to mark the epithelial tissue of the lungs. On the other project I have started making the parts for the system. I've cut glass, cut wires and made silicone molds for the system.

Pat Quinn