• Question: from where do you get the blood cells you work with?

    Asked by Diegoperezsanz to Sian, Max, Lizzie, Francis, Ben on 12 Mar 2018.
    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      I get the immune cells I work with from a few places:
      The blood of healthy people and of people with rheumatoid arthritis.
      The joints of people with joint inflammation.

    • Photo: Francis Man

      Francis Man answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      Mostly from healthy volunteers who agree to give me a bit of their blood. I usually need around 30-50 mL, that’s like 1/10th of a pint, not much really.
      I have to centrifuge the blood to extract the white blood cells.

    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      I work with two kinds of cells. The first kind are cells which come directly from patients, which I receive from donated blood – the same as Ben and Francis. These are difficult to grow in the lab but are good to study because they haven’t had much time to change or get damaged.

      But I also work with ‘immortalised’ cells which were extracted from patients a very long time ago and have been mutated so that they grow easily in the lab. These are really simple to grow and can be stored at really low temperatures and shared with scientists all over the world. The trade-off is that sometimes the results you get from immortalised cells aren’t the same as in cells directly from patients.

    • Photo: Sian Richardson

      Sian Richardson answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      We buy our bacteria (E.coli) in from other companies but then we add our own plasmids (DNA) to the cells ourselves.

    • Photo: Lizzie Wright

      Lizzie Wright answered on 13 Mar 2018:

      I don’t work with blood cells, so will leave this to the others 🙂

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