The Open University 360 lab tour

hello I'm dr. Janet Sumner I'm a scientist but I'm not a biologist so I'm joining dr. Rob Saunders in the School of Life health and chemical sciences for a tour of one of the labs in this short film we're bringing you a unique 360 degree immersive experience so take a minute now to have a look around and see what you can see right Rob where are we gonna start well we've chosen this lab because it's in many ways the hub for what we do in the department this kind of laboratory and this is a laboratory which is open planners you can see and ordinarily houses members of several research groups doing basic biochemical and molecular genetic research so much of the material that we work on here comes in from elsewhere in the department from other laboratories for example cell culture laboratories which you can find out a bit more elsewhere on the website the material comes in and really I suppose it's fair to say that a lot of what we do is involves the analysis of specific biomolecules so the first thing that happens is you might want to be a fractionating your sample to sell separate different cellular components and for that you would typically be using facilities such as this which is a set of different centrifuges right so the centrifuges separate biological particles and materials on the basis of fragments size and density is that why you've got different sizes of centrifuges yes that's right so some of these things up for do these things will operates at different speeds so the higher speed will be for separating smaller less dense fragments the individual rotors you can see in on the bench there a purple rotor which is a moderately sized volumes of samples and the big black rotor at the back house it would hold large large tubes that you might be separating pelleting cells from a large cell culture experiment why would you need a bit kind of big bucket of stuff well depends what it is you're looking for if what you're looking for is quite rare in the sample you're gonna grow up a lot of cells to if you're doing something like separating DNA from bacterial cells typically you're accruing those in half liter cultures so it's quite large ball yes okay so as I said earlier the the laboratory is used by members of several different research groups but all of their activities really use very similar basic laboratory equipment and this is a typical Bay from one of these for one of these research labs with lots of little pieces of kit dotted about and you know this this stuff ranges from the the worthy mixers for mixing up your samples it makes a a rather good nice whirring whirring noise yes so smaller centrifuges so this is really a very small scale version of what we saw in that room there and this would be used for separating very small samples in small one and a half milliliter plastic tubes things that you see the people preparing things that's right so that's tubes such as these and you'd be adding small volumes of liquid from from small handheld pipette they're don't at the end we've got a variety of heating blocks so a lot of what we do involves incubation of samples at different temperatures often because there's an enzyme involved so many of the enzymes we use operate at 37 degrees which is standard body temperature but sometimes not sometimes lower temperatures and of particular note are we have a large number of these these machines which are polymerase chain reaction machine so polymerase chain reaction or PCR is a very important technique in modern biology it enables you to amplify very small amounts of DNA into the quantities of DNA that you're able to analyze right by the kind of techniques we'll I'll show you in the next big I figured it got something to do with DNA yeah it has got a bit of a being a clue on here but this is this is a really important technique it's the sort of thing we use in the fly lab for identifying which mutations are present in our flies you would use it for seeing if particular oncogenes are mutant in a tumor sample so we're talking cows cancerous oh and you know in external laboratories it's a very important technique in forensic biology if you're trying to track down near the origin of a hair sample it a creme zine for example right that's how you do your DNA fingerprint so I've mentioned that what we really look at here are a variety of biological molecules and we separate them by biological molecules by gel arch of resis in many cases and and that's either using agarose gels for DNA and you'll see when I was in just a minute but also we separate proteins on on a different kind of gel matrix and essentially what you do here is you apply your mixture of biological molecules at one end of a gel matrix and pass an electric current across separating the molecules on the basis of their size and possibly their charge depending on how you're doing alright so obviously you've got a mixture of biological material in that sample so that's stuff your interest is not yes exactly right and so what one of the ways that we can do this is to use radioactive tracers you can specifically label molecules with a little low-level radioactivity and we have a an area in this lab which is closed off obviously because you need to have it contained away from general laboratory activity but typically you can spot your biological material by exposing your gel to a piece of x-ray film and the radioactivity causes the x-ray film to darken didn't brief of course more recently and more powerfully I think you can recognize specific protein molecules by using antibodies which proteins derived from the from the mammalian immune system so these things recognize specific regions of a characteristic regions of a protein so you can unambiguously identify a protein within the mix and safer as well you're safer as well because you're not dealing with radioactivity it's less hassle in the bureaucracy as well yes see here we've got one of one such an example of a kit for gel electrophoresis this is a medium-sized agarose gel so it's horizontal you can just see the gel matrix is this milky colored slab yeah yes it's really chemically it's the same but it's hot a higher degree of purity you need you often times you have to extract DNA from a gel like this for further analysis so it needs to be quite pure matrix and it's in a tank which is filled with a conductive liquid buffer which allows the electric current to be transmitted through the gel so you'd be typically be using that to look at the outcome of a polymerase chain reaction you'd be looking at it on here and gel agarose gels come in a whole variety of sizes that's quite a large one and this is the gel plate which is quite a bit smaller as you can see so this would be the sort of thing you would use in a very quick and quick analysis if you wanted to see if anything had come out from your reaction so what kind of things are you looking for on the gel plates then well typically for example from the PCR you'd be looking to see well it did the Polaris chain reaction actually work have you got anything to see and secondly have you got the DNA fragment that you would be expecting to see is it there is it there in the right quantities is it the right size sort of thing you're looking at you visualize the the DNA by staining with a fluorescent dye which shows up glows orange under ultraviolet so you need the right amount of DNA to be able to see if you've got anything there there's Verve all done experiments where you've not had enough sample to see what it is you're trying to see and what you can use a device like this which measures the absorbance of ultraviolet light in your biological sample so you can see how's your solution got enough DNA have you got enough DNA variants worth carrying on you and you go back to square one yeah similar you can use it for assessing they might have protein present yep I'm finally done in in this Bay we have a just that not again it's a number of standard laboratory pieces of kit so we have the usual fridges freezers and very low temperature freezers here so this one's more of more like a domestic freezer it goes down to minus 20 that's kind of what you'd be storing your pork chops in at home this thing's minus 80 degrees despite a lot colder and a lot of a lot of you would use this for long term storage materials for storing living cells frozen you'd be using liquid nitrogen which we don't keep in the main lab continue evaporating separate love so when you say long term storage what could you keep in there and for how long you could keep frozen bacterial samples alive in there indefinitely you can keep DNA samples in there and DNA is a very stable molecule that's why it's useful for forensics actually if you've got it in the right pH of the right buffer it all got lost for a long long time yeah but this bay here also has the sort of stuff you have for your initial analyses we've got stereo microscopes but doing dissections if you're starting with you working with animal tissues for example and the gel kits the usual thing so that's a matter a brief Whistlestop tour of a of a molecular biology laboratory it's in many ways as I say it's the hub of what we do in the laboratory we've got a lot of other specific facilities which you can find out a lot more about by looking elsewhere on the school web site Rob it's been fascinating thanks very much for giving us the tour I hope you find it interesting

Channel: The Open University's Faculty of STEM

Views: 16,145

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Id: v7tCftsyJqc

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2016