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Eric: Week 1 and 2

The FitzGerald Lab is located directly across from the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP). The building is called the Perelman Advanced Research Center, and the reason for this title is due to the concept that there are medical doctors that meet with patients on the first four floors and the top 5-12 floors are devoted to research and many labs. The name of the institute that I am working in is known as the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics (ITMAT). Translational medicine is the concept of going from the preclinical trials (in model organisms, ie. mouse) to clinical trials.

When I arrived at the lab, I was informed by the lab manager, Dropped . Tilo Grosser, that I will be working with nine other high school volunteers. Together, we are trying to answer the question of what is cyclooxyrgenase-2's (COX-2) role in inflammation. All ten of us were divided into teams of two, where each group is learning a lab technique and applying it to the research. This is the general plan for the first three weeks at the lab, but this concept was not completely clear my first week.

The first week consisted of two training days, where a postdoc taught all the volunteers the basic skills for the lab in addition to helping each of us understand all the safety precautions that should be taken with each technique. We ran through PCRs, pipetting, mass spectrometry, and western gels. In addition to the training phase in the lab, there would be daily meetings in the morning to discuss the topic that our groups would be working on for the day. Towards the end of the week, each of the groups of two were assigned to a mentor and every task performed afterward was strictly for the mentor's work. On the last day, I had to help dissect six mice, where three were COX-2 knockout (KO). During the dissection, there was a postdoc, Damion, that was explaining the anatomy and explaining the importance of how evolution is involved in all the adaptations in a mouse. (He is a fanatic about evolution, he gave everyone six phylogenic trees about mice!)

Going into the second week, I knew who my postdoc would be, and I already knew most of the people in the lab. My group's postdoc, Dr. Liz Hennessy, is the postdoc that I have been communicating with during the winter and spring. The part of her work that my group was working on was to determine how mouse macrophages (normal and COX-2 KO) would respond to different treatments (LPS, LDL, and DMSO). Although most of the experiment trials were performed during my second week at the lab, the extraction of the mouse stem cells and the preparation for the experiment occurred during the first week.

My favorite techniques that I have learned to perfect are: immune histology/microscopy, cellular differentiation, and PCR (finally making it work each time). Immune histology is using antibodies to observe proteins within cells under a fluorescent microscope, and the best part of this process is being able to compare the COX-2 KO cells to the control group cells. As for cellular differentiation, I had to make a media that contained the appropriate group of proteins that would initiate the process for the mouse stem cells to differentiate into macrophages. The media consisted of macrophage colony stimulating factor (MCSF), which contained the specific proteins required to properly differentiate in the macrophages.

As for the exploration of the city, I have time after my 9-5 schedule to go with the other volunteers to see their favorite tourist sites and restaurants (most of the volunteers live in the city). I've gone to see the famous Rocky Steps (from the movie) and from there we went to Geno's Cheesesteaks to have the best cheesesteaks in the world. I am looking forward to the weeks to come and to learn other lab techniques .

(There are more pictures below, there is a picture of a mouse dissection, so... WARNING!)









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