Now there is a sentence I thought I would never use! Often thought of as neutral, quiet and efficient partying wouldn’t then be their forte you would think. However as the Swiss national day approached the atmosphere in the city changed slightly and there was the sudden emergence of bars and stalls on the river banks. Then on the eve of the 31^st the city descended into carnage, there was no longer only youths drinking on the street the whole population seemed to descend upon this sleepy little city in order to celebrate the Federal Charter of 1291 (the day Switzerland became a country). The city was now alive and at 10:30 the biggest fireworks display I had ever witnessed had started lighting up the whole of the city and lasting for an hour or so. Then at 11:30 two huge ships sailed up the river and all the lights were turned off on the riverside to allow an even bigger fireworks display to start. It was quite frankly amazing, bigger then any new year or bonfire display I had ever seen. One of the more surprising things was the availability of fireworks on the night, I saw a child of no more than 8 years old running around with a bag of fireworks setting off firecrackers almost at will without the blink of an eye to the passers by. The whole evening was fantastic and I will certainly return one year to do it all again!

Regarding work last week was extremely interesting and I have clarified the information I can disclose in these blogs so here goes!

I started the week with a bacterial cell culture which I was shown how to isolate the RNA from the cells which can then be used with human cell lines as the concentration of RNA isolated from the human cells is much lower and the bacterial RNA can be added in order to boost the amount (so called carrier RNA). The next day I was left on my own to do it and I generated extremely good results (if I do say so myself) which allows me to use my own results in the up coming tests.

We then got a sample of purified  human-b cells from peripheral blood and isolated the RNA from these cells using the carrier bacterial RNA I had prepared earlier (kind of like Blue Peter) and we will then analyse this RNA and using quantitative RT-PCR we should be able to see if genes we are interested in are expressed in the B-cell subset.