Back to the Lab

Hey, it's a pretty sweet deal, but for about a few weeks every year they unshackle me from the hospital and let me screw around in the lab for a bit. Since I have a PhD as well as an MD, I know my way around the lab and have made some reasonable progress over the past 2 years. Anyways, I just started working in the lab again and will be happily pipetting for the next 2-3 weeks. I'm working in the lab of Josh Lipschutz and my research involves (in a very broad sense) how kidneys develop.

Specifically, my project is using kidney cells (MDCK cells) which when grown in a dish full of collagen they form these cool spherical cysts which are hollow. When you stimulate the cells with a growth factor (HGF), they start shooting out all these tubules--extensions made up of multiple cells. It's thought that this process is analagous to the way in which kidney development occurs in real life.

Our goal is to understand which molecules are responsible for the tubules forming. To this end, I'm going to use gene chip technology. This is pretty cool--companies have developed a small chip upon which tens of thousands of cDNAs are attached. There's a picture of how small this thingamajig is. The powerful thing about the technology is that you can look at a HUGE number of genes all at the same time.

Should be fun! The experiment is scheduled for this Thursday...