Results are always good

I finished another Western blot, well, actually 6 of them. The results were encouraging I think. I am not sure what I expected. I ran two gels with control tissue (2 different Greater Auricular nerves - they are sensory nerves that transmit touch from the ear). I transfered the proteins to nitrocellulose membranes and incubated them with antibodies raised against Erk, AKT, and JNK, as well as the phophorylated, or activated, versions of those three signalling proteins. Both Erk (pronounced irk) and AKT are generally considered to be enzymes involved in proliferative signalling pathways while JNK (pronounced junk) is considered to be a player in cell death pathways. The non-activated versions showed equal amounts of protein between both samples - thankfully - but only AKT was activated in both samples. Now I need to go back a do the same experiment with my vestibular schwannoma samples so that I can compare the two. This will give us the beginning of an idea as to what signalling pathways are activated in this tumor. We have so much work to do and of necessity it crawls at a snail's pace.