Very considerate of the UK giving everyone a day off work tomorrow so we can use bluesky more. We also get next Monday off too. (Well I’ll probably still have to go into the lab - cancer cells don’t seem to take days off)

An underrated benefit of bluesky only allowing image posts is that I never need to see these goddamn gifs again

There is! It’s this guy

Bluesky has introduced a verification system onto the app. Notable users will now get a pink exclamation mark on their profiles. The mark is meant to represent the excitement you feel when seeing the account

I would love an invite for two of my Twitter best friends. I can 100% vouch for them. They’re good people. @wombot.cloud can definitely vouch for Mish (not sure if wombot knows Umbra)! Also another great reporter to bring on would be Robert Silverman! (@BobSaietta on the other place)

I’m really sad that my two Twitter besties aren’t on here 😭. Please hook them up with an invite (or give me two codes for them). Umbra posts great little poems and Mish is friends with all her local possums and other wildlife!!

This is so beautifully deranged I can’t help but love it

With that all done I can finally put the freezing tubes into the -80 freezer! In a few days we’ll move the cells to liquid nitrogen storage but they need to acclimatise to the cold first

Here is the cell pellet! I now need to take off the liquid (carefully) and then add freezing media to the pellet and get it mixed up again. Then I’ll put the freezing media and cell mix into two labelled and dated freezing tubes

Ok so now we need to create a pellet of cells. To do so I add the lifted cells to a 50ml tube and put this into a centrifuge spinning at 1400 rotations per minute for 10 min. I also need a tube with an equal weight and volume to balance the cell tube otherwise the rotor of the centrifuge can break

I’ve added the accutase and put the cells back in the incubator. Now I have to wait a few minutes for the cells to detach from the flask container. We keep track of how long the accutase has been on the cells with this gloriously old-fashioned clock thingy

Now getting the cell flasks from our incubator!

Getting all the equipment and reagents I’ll need for the freezing process out and ready!

Got my lab coat and gloves on and starting by spraying my work area in a biological safety cabinet with 70% ethanol solution to sterilise it

Picture of some pancreatic cells from the lab just now!
These look over 80% confluent (essentially a measure of how much area in the cell flask they’re taking up). I will now be lifting the cells (getting them unattached) and freezing them down so we have some frozen stock for future experiments

And now a whole bus to myself

Got a whole tube to myself tonight