Hello. Welcome to the Laboratory of Translational Genomics in NCI's Division of Cancer Epidemiology
and Genetics. I'm Francine, and I'm a fellow here. And this is my mentor,
Dr. Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson. She is the chief of her lab. And, around here, we call
her Mila. So we have what is called a bench/bay concept. And what that basically means is that,
on one side, we have our benches. And our benches is where we conduct our experiments. And then
on the other side is our bay. It contains our desk. It's basically our workstation.
It's where we do our literature review. It's where we do data analysis. It's where we have our very
many Zoom meetings. Here we have a biobank. This robot is an automated liquid handling workstation.
It dispenses and removes liquid in 96 well plates, which basically means it makes life easier for us.
It can do so much at once. So, for example, we use this robot to clean PCR products for Sanger
DNA sequencing. Instead of pipetting liquid into each well one at a time,
you can use this big robotic pipette to do it all at once. And so we see this giant
robot in motion. And it's super cool because, one, you got the color going; and, two,
the machine is doing all the work. How awesome is that?
This is a real-time PCR machine which we use to genotype samples for specific genetic
variants. This robotic arm is going to come and collect this 384 well plate;
384 well plate is going to be loaded up with samples that we want to know the genotype for.
There's a barcode that's on the plate that we use to ensure that whatever is coming from here
will translate over into the machine and also onto the computer. So, when we pull it up,
we know that everything is matched up, it goes to the right plate, right samples.
And then there's no mistakes because the last thing you want to do is mix genotypes up. That
will just ruin your entire experiment. So this is a cell culture room where fellows in Mila's lab,
we do all our lovely cell cultures. And today's your lucky day because I've got some
cell culturing to do. I really only have media to change. But, still, it's really important that we
change out the media of our culture because cells like a happy healthy environment because
they're human cells. And we're humans, and we like happy, healthy environments; our cells like happy,
healthy environments. So I'm going to change out the media. And media is basically their food.
So this is what we call an incubator. This is where we keep our cells.
Some are in flasks. Some are in plates. Everything inside the hood is sterile. Everything outside the
hood is not sterile. So before we put anything in the hood, we spray it down with 70% ethanol. I'm
just going to remove the old media. I'm going to give it a wash just to get rid of any dead cells.
Just wash it around. Just trying to get rid of anything that -- junk that's left behind.
Aspirate that. I'm going to add some fresh media.
And that, my friends, is all there is to changing media. I'm going to put this back in
the incubator. We have multiple instruments here at LTG lab that we use for our experiments. But
today I showed you some of the ones that we use every day, specifically the ones that I use in the
work that I do. I hope that this experience and this tour has gotten you excited about
cancer research and even more excited about the field of research on a whole. If you're interested
and you want to learn more about the work that we do here at LTG, please visit dceg.cancer.gov.
If you are interested in doing an internship or a research training here,
please visit training.nih.gov. Thank you for stopping by and spending this time with me.