The last couple of days have been all about dissections. Everyday I have been dissecting at least 15 eggs. It takes me the whole morning to get through them all. But the good news is that I am getting better at it and faster. I found out that my dissections are better than the dissections in the senior thesis I read in preparation for the lab. I have to dissect many eggs because I will start staining them for different proteins. The more lungs I have the more staining I can accomplish and the more information I will have. The way the staining process works is that you take specific antibodies that target a certain protein within the tissue. You then add a second antibody that targets the original antibody.Then you add fluorescent tags to the tissue. The second antibody allows for more fluorescence to be seen from the one protein. I have already stained for an lCAM protein, a protein on the epithelial cells, which allows the lung branches to light up. Next week I will be staining for different proteins that will help show the structure of the lungs.
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