Plan B

And now an update on the Praktikum I've been up to at the Fraunhofer Institute:

After 8 weeks on the job, I'm entering the homestretch of the internship firing on all Bunsen burners. The first month was mostly an Ausbildung where I learned and gained experience with aseptic technique and the culturing, counting, and torturing of cells. I also learned the basics of a completely different style of computer programming (LabView) and assembled a nice little program that reads in data from pressure sensors. There had been plenty of odd jobs to do, like building capillaries, assembling an adaptor/interface for a machine (soldered for the first time), and correcting my colleagues' grammar. And train my Praktikant.

I was happy to absorb all of the information and experience during June, but after running tests for a whole month, I realized that not only were the cytotoxicity assays losing their edge, but my results indicated that the water was more toxic than the notorious silver particles swimming in it. OsNOsis it what it should be called.

In light of the circumstances, I negotiated with my supervisor and replaced the rest of the scheduled cytotoxicity tests with an experiment to optimize an assay. I designed an experiment modeled after the Taguchi Method and hope to find more reproducible and robust parameters for a test which measures membrane damage. As far as I can tell, no one has ever tried to optimize a cytotoxicity test using this method before...time will tell if that makes my idea groundbreaking or incredibly far-fetched and stupid.

We'll hope for the former, since in one month I'll be officially presenting my body of work in front of the Department of Biohybrid Systems. Seminars are held in our department every Tuesday in which someone presents his or her research and findings, or discusses a topic on the cutting edge of biotechnology. I'm looking forward to it, but I'll be hard-pressed to condense everything I learned and worked on this summer into a single presentation. It should go well, but just in case, Plan B is a well-rehearsed, half-minute hip-hop dance routine that'll show those jokers the meaning of cytotoxic.