Friday, November 16, 2012

First Successful Dot Blot!

My previous dot blots were failures. If there's something wrong with our method of detecting the JHBP, I can't advance to the extraction process. I tested with hemolymph samples and the results was a weird "negative staining" - the pigment stained the paper, but where the protein is supposed to be remained white. Prof. Goodman said he's never met this problem in his lab. There could be problems with our antibodies, techniques, material, or something else but we didn't know.

Goodman decided that the antibodies in the refrigerator might be expired. We went to the basement on Tuesday to the huge cold room where stores all of his antibodies and other precious stuff. I watched him digging boxes of tubes out of the negative 80 degree Celsius freezer since he hasn't touched them for a long time. Finally he handed me a 50 mL Falcon tube - which reads "MAB #6, 1. 28. 99" - and told me that was the monoclonal mouse anti-JHBP antibody he obtained in 1999.

The process of producing the antibody was expensive and tedious. JHBP was first injected into a mouse and the antibody was produced at peak after a month and half. The mouse's spleen cell was taken out and cultured - a single cell in each well - with spleen cells made cancer. The cells will hybridize successfully in only a few of those cultures, starting to divide indefinitely and producing the primary antibody. This hybrid cancer cell then was injected into the abdominal cavity of another mouse. The poor mouse grew larger and larger with the tumors until it couldn't walk anymore. Its body fluid, a rich source of the antibody, was dripped and collected. Prof. Goodman made a contract with a company that produced this antibody, and he must hand in large quantity of the antigen - the JHBP - in return. However, over a decade he hasn't figured out how to do it.

I was told to separate the antibody into aliquots, because antibody is best not be refrozen. Since Goodman shared his valuable backlog with me, I treated it as deliberately as possible. On the same day, I pipetted the antibody into 108 centrifuge tubes, 100 micro-liter each, and labeled and stored them in the freezer. 

We were suspecting that the problem with the dot blot was the PVDF paper, which didn't seem to absorb the samples, and the dot blot apparatus. Prof. Goodman let me use nitrocellulose paper and just a vacuum instead on Thursday. He killed another Manduca caterpillar for its hemolymph. I prepared the samples, straight hemolymph and 1/10 concentration, and tested them with different concentrations of the primary and secondary antibody.
 
It was a success! Not only we found that nitrocellulose paper absorbs the samples much more efficiently, we also determined the optimal concentrations for each antibody, the ones that stain the samples the darkest while give the lightest background color. It looked like 1:1000 primary antibody and 1:5000 secondary antibody (column #6) is the best combination for detecting JHBP.

A note on the strength of the signal is, I put 2 micro-liter hemolymph on each dot. Goodman said the concentration of JHBP in Manduca hemolymph is 1.4 nano-gram/1 micro-liter. The purple dot we saw there indicated the presence of 2.8 nano-gram of JHBP.

We became much more upbeat, because the problem wasn't the antibodies, which would be a much bigger trouble. Prof. Goodman said this experiment could be my introductory research project. I felt that he looked at me with more appreciation. I'm gradually getting out of the clumsy novice phase. Although it's just start for me, Goodman is also finding that I'm a diligent and capable person - someone he'd like to be in his lab and good for doing science.

P.S.  I asked, "So it means every time I do a Western blot or dot blot, we have to kill a caterpillar?" "That's what they're there for," said Goodman, "We sacrificed trillions of bacteria in the experiments. You can just hear them screaming in the back room 'NO NO NO not me!'" I said, "They're genetically modified to produce a protein that they hate. They probably want to die." "They want to commit bacteriocide!"

4 comments:

  1. 恭喜你啦!雖然有些描述我實在看不懂,再來你要開始寫研究文章了嗎?

    還有可憐的毛毛蟲,如果你們做實驗之後(擠完汁)把它放回去,它就不會活了嗎?

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    1. 理論上來說不會死,但毛毛蟲算受重傷吧。教授好像覺得反正毛毛蟲那麼多,有些最後總會被他拿去做別的用途,先把牠們冷凍起來。

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  2. 恭喜你已經找到Sample and Monocolonal Antibody間的Optimal Dose
    其實這個劑量應該以前就已經作過了
    在每一個Antibody拿到時
    最先就是要把這個量的關係找出來
    以後的實驗才能方便進行

    當年我在做paper的前一年也碰到類似的狀況
    但是我的指導教授一直認為是我實驗技術有問題
    我重復同一個步驟做了至少七八十次
    花了一年多的時間
    後來還到另外一個實驗室才找到原因
    原來老闆給我的細胞株可能被污染了
    molecular lab.就是如此
    一個小小的誤差就可能畢不了業

    不論如妳已經開始有自己的心得
    還真的是要恭喜一下

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    1. 教授說之前沒有人做過關於這個抗體的optimal dose實驗,他的研究生常常放太多,background color就太深了。
      真奇怪,你的教授怎麼不站在旁邊看一次,或乾脆自己做一次,看是不是實驗技術問題。

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