Our flow cytometer arrived today from San Diego.

It came off the truck packed on multiple pallets, so we get to spend today setting it up.  The flow cytometer is one of the cooler instruments in our lab- it will allow us to distinguish individual cells.

Once it’s set up, we will load samples into the tube pictured above.  We’ll be able to look at each T cell and see if it is activated.  It will allow us to see when the CD8 cells attack infected CD4 cells, and see if they successfully killed the infected cell.

The laser came in a separate box.

Clearly, we still have some more setting up to do. We’ll be back soon with more updates from our lab.