Week 3 went by really fast!
The first day of internship my mentor explained to me the sequence into making a virus and I didn’t realize that it would take so long! We are on our third week and we are still not done. 
This whole week we have focused on the harvesting the cells portion and we still have more to go, but I got to actually see that the plasmid we have been making actually went into out HEK cells (human embryonic kidney cells). The way we know how our plasmid mad it in is due to a GFP gene that we insert into our DNA (some of your might have done the Transformation of E.coli with GFP lab, its kind of the same concept). After reading the protocols and watching a lot of You Tube videos about the prepping of the virus and the Harvesting process, I was really looking forward to seeing the cells glow– well, they don’t glow without a black light but with the blacklight they do glow!
cells glowing!
Beautiful pellet with virus infected cells
Now that we are done harvesting and we have that beautiful green pellet at the bottom we have resuspended the cells and I got a chance to use Liquid Nitrogen to freeze them! I keep getting really excited about all things we are doing because its my first time doing it. I asked my mentor how many times he had created virus and his number is around a thousand!
Next week is Virus Purification and then we can run a qPCR to see how much virus we actually have!