The Flavour of Lab Work: Cooking an ELISA

By Søren Beck Jensen, postdoc TREC

Good morning, I am Søren Beck Jensen and I am a postdoc at the TREC laboratory. It is Monday morning, and work in the laboratory has already begun. Today we have to perform a technique that is called ELISA.lab_soren
It is able to measure how much of a specific protein that we have in a sample, for example a blood sample. For good work, you need good people. Robin, Ina and Nadja (left to right in the picture) are enthusiastic to see what they have in their samples.

ELISA is quiet simple to perform: You put each of your samples into a well in a multi-well plate (below bottles) and follow a number of steps that allows each of your samples to be exposed to the reagent in each of the five bottles (above the plate). lab_soren2After the procedure each well contains a yellow liquid and the darker the yellow colour is the more of you protein of interest was in the sample, Simple.

Laboratory work is much like cooking; you need to be a good chef and have the right ingredients. Also you need to follow the recipe and have a feeling of what you are doing. Here laboratory technician (Nadja) or a PhD students (Robin and Ina) are the chefs. The bottles and the multi-well plate are the ingredients. Good cooking takes a long time and it has quickly become dinnertime. Unfortunately, this dish needs to simmer over-night. I hope that the results will be ready tomorrow, please re-join the TREC-Blog tomorrow for an update.

Who will order Pizza?

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