Surgery Godfather

Chapter 2234: Chapter 1456: Room Temperature

Weber sat in the laboratory for the entire afternoon.

He spread the experiment logbook on the desktop, with three different brands of temperature loggers, a pH meter, a cell counting board, and a stack of freshly printed literature beside it. Sunlight slanted in through the window, casting a bright spot on the desktop, with tiny dust particles floating in it, like countless particles performing Brownian motion.

"Incubator Temperature Fluctuation Records," he muttered to himself, writing the title on the first page.

For the past three hours, he recorded the actual temperature of the incubator every ten minutes. The set value was thirty-seven degrees, but the actual readings fluctuated between thirty-six point eight and thirty-seven point three. Every time the door was opened to place or remove cells, the temperature would drop abruptly to around thirty-five degrees, then take fifteen minutes to recover to the set value. For most cells, this fifteen-minute low-temperature exposure was insignificant, but for certain sensitive stem cell differentiation systems, it could be a fatal disturbance.

"But when I did the experiment last week, the temperature fluctuations were the same." Weber frowned, drawing a curve on the paper, "If temperature is the variable, then last week’s data should have failed as well."

He put down the pen and walked to the cell culture room, opening the incubator door. It was filled with culture dishes, like transparent flying saucers, neatly arranged on the metal rack. He took out his batch of stem cells and observed them under the inverted microscope.

Cell morphology was normal, adherence was good, with no obvious signs of contamination. But he noticed a detail: the cell density at the edge of the dishes seemed slightly higher than in the central area. This indicated that when seeding, the cell suspension was not mixed thoroughly, leading to uneven distribution.

"Cell density..." Weber muttered to himself, suddenly recalling something, and quickly walked back to the desk, flipping open the experiment logbook.

The experiment record of last week’s "perfect data" noted the cell count as "1.2×10^6/ml." In these three failed records, the cell count was also "1.2×10^6/ml." The numbers were the same, but in actual practice, counting errors typically ranged between ten to twenty percent. If last week’s actual density was 1.0×10^6/ml, and the actual density for these three times was 1.4×10^6/ml, then the state of the cells when seeding could be entirely different.

"No, that’s not right," Weber shook his head, "Density difference would affect proliferation speed, but not change the direction of differentiation. The difference between the conditional medium group and the control group should still exist, just the magnitude would be different."

He leaned back in the chair, closed his eyes, and mentally went through the entire experiment process again. From cell thawing to seeding, from medium preparation to conditional medium addition, from staining to flow cytometry... each step flashed through his mind like a movie scene.

Suddenly, a scene froze.

On the morning of the experiment last week, while preparing the conditional medium, the laboratory’s air conditioning was under maintenance, and the room temperature was about three degrees higher than usual. He remembered complaining about the heat and taking off his white gown. Meanwhile, these three repeated experiments were conducted with the air conditioning functioning normally, maintaining the room temperature at twenty-three degrees.

"Room temperature?" Weber’s eyes snapped open, "Could room temperature affect the medium’s temperature, thereby affecting the cells’ stress response during operations?"

He immediately turned on the computer and searched the literature. Within ten minutes, he found a paper published in Cell Report, titled "Unexpected Effects of Environmental Temperature on Stem Cell Fate Decision." The paper pointed out that if the medium temperature falls below thirty-five degrees during the first two hours after cell seeding, it activates a stress response-related signaling pathway, which inhibits certain differentiation programs while enhancing the cells’ self-renewal ability.

"The first two hours..." Weber’s heartbeat quickened. Last week during the air conditioning maintenance, the room temperature was twenty-six degrees, and when he seeded the cells, the exposure time of the medium at room temperature was longer than usual by a few minutes. This temperature difference for those few minutes might have just triggered that stress pathway, causing the cells to respond differently to the factors in the conditional medium.

"But this is just a hypothesis." Weber forced himself to calm down. In research, a beautiful hypothesis is just a story without experimental validation. He needed to design a control experiment specifically to verify this variable of temperature exposure time.

He checked the time, five forty in the afternoon. It was too late to perform the validation experiment today, as cells needed to thaw in advance and the medium needed to be prepared. He saved the plan, ready to start first thing the next morning.

Upon leaving the laboratory, Weber ran into Tang Shun in the hallway.

"How is it? Any clues?" Tang Shun asked.

"I’ve got a hypothesis," Weber explained his idea about the temperature exposure time.

Tang Shun listened, pondering for a moment: "Even if temperature exposure time is a variable, it might not be the only one. The complexity of biological systems lies in the possible interactions between multiple variables. Temperature exposure time might interact with cell passage, serum batch, and the position of the incubator. Finding one variable doesn’t mean you’ve found them all."

Weber nodded: "I understand, but that’s research—one by one, you eliminate, and one by one, you confirm. At least now there’s a direction, no longer grasping at straws."

"And Professor Yang?" Tang Shun asked.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!