Week 2- Mariela

I started off the week by playing with blood!

At least attempting to, since I have terrible veins to draw blood from. I also learned how to draw blood and then attempted to use my newly learned skill on a very patient and trusting research associate to no avail. It ended up taking three people and five veins to finally get enough blood to work with. With the blood I had acquired, I isolated the platelets through a series of centrifugation and washing steps and then incubated them with a fluorescent antibody to visualize the platelets. See Figure 1 for an image of the platelets. It was my first time attempting this, so I was very excited to see some results.

Figure 1: Assessing the presence of platelets by immunofluorescence using Alexafluor 647 conjugated Mouse anti Human CD61 antibody, clone Y2/51

 
It was a slow week clinic-wise. I was able to follow up on some cases that had come last week, so it would be interesting to see how these cases continue to progress through my time here. Next week I should be able to observe at the clinic more, as well as shadow Dr. Hu, an urologist, in surgery.

Fun in NYC: My friends and I walked for an hour and a half to Chealsea Market for tacos (very good; not worth walking an hour and a half). I also wandered around the boutiques at SOHO for window shopping and almost bought a secondhand Burberry trenchcoat that I still kind of regret not buying.