Read on Twitter
Hello twitter! Today I thought of showing you what an experiment from start to finish looks like for me! Here is a quick outlook:
So first we collect our samples, I typically work with pig and rat hearts. Upon collection I fix the tissue in small chunks and freeze it. This way we can preserve it from decay.
We then cut tissue sections as thin as 3-7um using the cryomicrotome. Getting the right orientation and nice sections can be tricky; type of fixation, type of tissue, temperature can all affect the sectioning, so one needs to work a bit harder to save some pain in later steps!
Once a nice section has been taken, it’s time to tag the proteins of interest. In a 2-3 day process, tissue is incubated with primary and secondary antibodies to label the proteins we are interested in imaging.
The way we do that is we stick the glass (coverslip) with the adhered tissue section on chambers that can hold a small amount of volume. They allow solution exchange, and can be re-used which is great! We use humidified boxes to perform our immunolabelling procedure.
Then, if labelling has been successful, it’s time for super-resolution imaging! Take one image can last for a couple of hours, and during that time we need to make sure everything is running smoothly. Here I am making sure of that! 
Then we are back to our computers (currently in our home offices) to do image processing and analysis! We get feedback/ideas and go back for more images, readjusting the experiments accordingly and get a few data for statistical analysis.
This sounds easy enough, right? How does it take four years if I described it in a few tweets?! It is a learning process as everything is, and things can go wrong, ideas can change, priorities too…and then there is pandemic right at the end to top the experience off!
Let me know if there are any steps that you would like me to discuss in more details in the days to come! Cheers!