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Asked by to Ian on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
Question: Under the confocal microscope why is it that the single brain cell is bright green and how do you get the brain cell? Is it human?
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Ian Hands-Portman answered on 13 Mar 2014:
We have genes for thousands of proteins but not all cells produce all proteins and we’re interested in finding out where certain proteins are made. We use a protein originally found in jelly fish called Green Fluoresecent protein – GPF. We take the gene for it and tack it onto the gene for a protein we’re interested in. Whenever the protein we want is made, we also get GFP so a cell making the protein will light up green when we shine UV light on it.
In that picture only one cell is making the the protein we want and GFP so it stands out in green. We also add a stain called DAPI that sticks to DNA and makes it light up blue – that means the nucleus of each of the surrounding cells shows up as a blue dot.
Those cells were probably mouse cells taken from a mouse and grown on in a petri dish.
If you want to see just how complex – and beautiful this technique can be, do an image search for ‘brainbow’ some of the pictures are mindblowing.
Comments
sfletcher commented on :
Wow thanks that sounds interesting! where do you get the animals ( jellyfish and mice) from?
Ian commented on :
The jellyfish gene was collected by another research group years ago and and is now just shared amongst scientists. The mice have to be bred for us.
nhssumml1 commented on :
OK why kill mice or any animal for science?
Ian commented on :
I was wondering when this one would crop up and I’m afraid the answer might get quite long.
First just to tell you where I stand – I don’t use animals but I work with people that do and I look at their samples. I would never agree to help in work on apes or monkeys or any work involving the military ( I do have principles ).
People have every right to question what scientists do – taxes pay for a lot of our work, but I won’t take seriously objections from anyone that eats meat or wears leather – noone needs to do that ( though I do ).
I’ll use just one area of science – neurobiology as an example.
Whenever possible we don’t use animals, we use cells in a dish that have been grown artificially but there’s some information that we can only get from animals. It’s fine looking at a cultured brain cell in a dish and we can get a lot of information but if we’re trying to understand how to treat brain damage, paralysis and things like alzheimers we need to understand how brain cells talk to each other and for that we have to look at a real brain.
We can’t use human brains as we need living, fresh cells and the only way to get those would be to nip out and shoot someone or wait for someone to die at exactly the right time. Even then, people drink, smoke and age which means the cells might not even be healthy and we’d run out pretty quickly.
There are VERY strict rules on what can and can’t be done and the government regularly inspects, if anyone breaks the rules they don’t just tell them off, they shut down the whole place – scientists can’t just do what they want- all ideas for experiments have to be looked at by a committee that decides whether or not it’s worthwhile.
Despite what some organisations might say, this sort of research is relevant to the human body and there isn’t an alternative – yet – we are getting better at computer models and cells in dishes but they still have to be compared to a living thing or we don’t know if what we’re doing is real.
Compared to the number of animals that are killed in farming or even the numbers killed on the road use of animals in science is very low and these people are actually trying to improve the lives of everyone. I’ve been in hospital a fair few times and if you give me a choice of a treatment that’s been tested on animals vs one that hasn’t I’ll go for the animal one every time.
If you’ve made it this far – well done!
One passing thought – is it right to keep chimpanzees and other apes locked up in a zoo for their whole lives? how does that compare to other areas of science?
sfletcher commented on :
How come the gene has survived that long? what part of the mouse do you take the cells from? you don’t have to kill them do you?
Ian commented on :
A gene is not a living thing – it’s just a string of DNA, outside the cell it’s just a slightly complicated chemical made up of four different pieces ( we label them A,T,C and G ) strung together in a long chain, the order of the letters tells the cell how to put together the protein that a particular gene makes – it’s just a list of instructions.
A piece of DNA will sit in a tube practically forever if you just stick it in the freezer and we don’t even need it – as long as we know the order of the letters in gene we can make it again in the test tube – or these days just order it from a company that makes them for us.
as for the second part of your question, this is going to be a fairly long answer I’ll only want to type once so if you’ll forgive me, I’ll ask you to read the reply to nhssumml1 above.
sfletcher commented on :
Well i guess no animals get harmed. thanks for the dna gene thingymaboby
sfletcher commented on :
in a zoo I mean!