Since we are going to be using viruses a lot in the next week or so, I think I should probably tell the Internet more about viruses, both viruses in general and in the one we are using in particular. I wasn't a part of the virus-making process, but I was part of the plasmid-isolating-from-bacteria-to-put-in-the-virus bit. We used a MIDI prep in order to isolate the bit of DNA we wanted from the bacteria it came from. Bacteria smells absolutely terrible, by the way, not in an overtly bad smell, but like a normal smell that is just, off. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on MIDI preps here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid_preparation. The bit of plasmid in question happened to have the magical ability to over express PLAP, the marker that we were going to use to count exosomes. By isolating it using this MIDI prep, we can then put it into the virus which will the infect the cells and tell them to produce PLAP and package it in exosomes. Next in the timeline, the virus was actually made and aliquoted, split into a whole bunch of equally sized volumes from a large volume.

This week, we have to first seed the cells onto a six-well plate with a certain number of cells in each well. It starts like a regular cell split, but after deactivating the Trypsin, it actually has to be centrifuged to get rid of it altogether because we don't want it interacting with the stuff we use to infect the cells with virus. Then we put regular cell food in there, then, after mixing the cells back into the media, we take a bit of the mixture, put it onto a special plate, then stick it in- I kid you not- a cellometer. Which counts cells. Then we do some quick math magic and Abracadalgebra! We have the proper amount of media to put into each plate to make sure enough cells get on there. I don't have anything after this because when we tried to seed the cells last time, science failed and with one kind of cells, there weren't enough in order to have the proper amount in each well, and we dropped the conical containing a different line of cells, so we have to wait before the other flask is ready to be seeded, especially after we split it into two flasks so we have another back-up.