Okay, here’s a sample of the kinds of things I spend my time on at work. This is an image I made recently using a combination of light and fluorescent microscopy. This picture is of an 10μm thick section of mouse lung tissue. What you are seeing is actually an overlay of four different images:

1. The gray “embossed” looking image is of the overall structure of the tissue as viewed through light microscopy using a laser scanner on the Zeiss confocal microscope I use.
2. All of the blue clumps dispersed around the field are the nucleii of pneumocytes (lung cells) that have been stained with a fluorescent dye called DAPI.
3. Probably the most obvious stain is the green fluorescent color which is another dye bound to an antibody which sticks to Clara Cells of the bronchioles. These cells are responsible for eliminating any foreign matter that finds itself in the lung. You can see the green is in a circular pattern like the cross section of bronchial tube would appear.
4. Lastly, there is red dye that is bound to an antibody which sticks to a special kind of pneumocytes that are deep in the alveoli of the lung, the small bags of air where gas exchange takes place.

A rare stem cell population would stain positive for both the green and red fluorescent dye (showing up as yellowish), but none of those appear in this image. My current work involves adding a fourth stain (and fifth image) which would light up the cells expressing the customized gene I inserted into the transgenic mice I engineered.

[tags]antibody, Clara Cells, DAPI, fluorescent, laser scanning microscopy, microscope, Type 2 Pneumocytes[/tags]

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Geekiness, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.