Fun times with histo!

Histology is the study of tissues. The theoretical part of it is quite interesting and detailed, but the practical lab sessions tend to slowly strangle me so I can hardly breathe at the end of the day- EVERY FRIDAY! We look at slides of the tissue type that was on the previous lecture using light microscopes and draw them in our notebooks which we then get the lab assistant to sign off. He also rambles on about electron micrographs which I rarely even look at that we will also be examined on (*need to pay more attention! hrr*). It used to last until 6:30pm (yeah, on a Friday!) because my last name is so cool and at the end of the alphabet I get to be in the late group all-the-frickin-time, but this semester they thankfully switched the schedule so we get to go to the early session and finish at 3 instead every -Friday-. BLISS! Starting the weekend early/-ier is a privilege I have missed.

Well my point is that the last histo-lab was not all that boring. We looked at a slide of hepatocytes (liver cells) stained with silver so that the cell nuclei and cell membranes are outlined in a black-ish colour which just looks really cool rather than emphasising acidic and basic cell compartments which other dyes such as hematoxin and eosin do (sorry about the geek talk- oh wait, haha...  as if it's not going to get geekier if you keep reading...) It looked like thisssssss:

Hepatocytes surrounding the central vein (i.e. hole) in the middle. whoop! Kind of looks like an eyeball, doesn't it? ^_^

Yeah.... well I just got really excited about this slide as I found it to be super pretty after constantly looking at pink/purple slides which all look more or less I-DENT-I-CAL! No bloody idea how I'm going to remember how to differentiate between types of the -same- tissue in an exam... because they DO look alike while they really are oh-so-different. Need to find myself some photographic memory and patience somewhere.

All right, microscope slide hype is over. I'm going to go dream about living inside animal cells and hitchhiking on dyneins and kinesins on the cytoskeleton highways now. Night.


.n