My Labonews

Back from the dead, I'm finally able to upload the fantastic confocal pictures to the gallery.

These are so-called DRG's or Dorsal Root Ganglions, which are found next to the spinal cord in the lower party of the body. We therefor took fertilized chicken embryos which had to be prepared and fixed first. This basically ment opening up some 6 (warm) eggs, containing an interesting mixture of bloody slime, an embryo looking like a small chicken without feathers and the anticipated yolk. The head and everything slimy / bloody had to be discarded, filling up a 500ml beaker. No omelettes for me for the next weeks! Under the binocular, the ganglions were pretty difficult to extract intactly with our precious 35 CHF Gehring-schweizer-Uhrmacher-pincettes. The were then transferred onto slides in a special medium, cultured for a night and stained with a CY3 antibody. We brought our samples to the Arber lab, where we could take pictures of them with the confocal microscope, which gives you images of an astonishing quality, as is scans by laser through the different sections, merging them into one all-over sharp image (also providing 3D information). Enjoy!

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