Pat Quinn - Day 26

This is my final week in the lab so the work load has gone down. I no longer need to dissect eggs because I already have enough lungs to do my final staining. I am still in charge of maintaining the eggs and the incubators. This week I will be finishing off my last staining. Last week I finished staining smooth muscle actin and laminin. The smooth muscle staining of the lungs over a few days basically shows the development of the blood vessels within the lungs. In order to do the laminin staining the lungs must first be embedded and sectioned. Embedding the lungs means putting the lungs into an agarose gel that will hold the lungs in place. The sectioning means that you will cut the lungs horizontally at thicknesses measured in microns. Since I am not old enough to use the sectioning machince this part of the project has been done by an undergraduate. The process is much quicker for staining sections so it only takes about two days to get results. Laminin is found in the basement membrane within tissues which is the layer that epithelial cells lay on. From the laminin staining I found that laminin is not found on the tips of buds. This suggests that the basement membrane is broken down on buds in order for branching morphogenesis to occur. The staining that i will be doing this week is Vimentin which plays a role in EMT. I have also been organizing pictures and data for the poster.