practical 7 in a test-tube

In practical 7 you will be working with red blood cells and proteins called lectins that bind sugars. 

A little background...

Since red blood cells have sugars on their cell surface, and since lectin proteins have more than one sugar binding site, if you add lectin proteins to a suspension of red blood cells, the lectin proteins will bind the sugars on the red blood cells and consequentially link the red blood cells up in a 3D array. In this lab you will be looking at the ability of lectins to bind and cross-link red blood cells, and at the ability of sugars in solution to compete and interfere with this binding. 

I'll add a pictorial description of this in a later post...for now back to the lab overview.

During this lab you will be:

• using a microscope to count red blood cells and estimate total cell number in your sample
• performing a protein binding assay
• designing and performing an experiment to determine the net surface charge of red blood cells

The day will be divided into the following activities:

Activity 1 : Determine the specificity of a lectin for different sugar molecules by observing whether different sugar molecules disrupt the ability of the lectin to cross-link red blood cells
Activity 2 : Use a microscope to estimate the number of red blood cells in a sample

Activity 3 : Design and perform an experiment to determine the charge on the surface of red blood cells

So in this lab you will be learning some important techniques as well as important concepts such as protein binding, affinity, specificity and competition. This time your lab manual does not give you such a step-by-step breakdown of the activities - instead it has been designed to make you think about what you are doing and how it is best to do it. Therefore, it is more important than ever that you read your lab manual thoroughly before you come on the day.

As always, I will be preparing some lovely posts for this practical, so stay tuned and happy reading.

See you in the lab!