In week 4, my job in the lab has been mainly three tasks. My first task was the old task of analyzing data by using analysis of variance on SPSS. Last week, I was learning the skills of operating SPSS, a computer software that does ANOVA and completes other statistical tests for researchers. This week, I performed ANOVA tests on the kindergarten and first grade data. Coming to the lab, I was hoping to find that ensemble music education does improve children’s cognitive abilities. However, what my analysis told me that ensemble music education does not significantly affect the treatment group’s cognitive abilities, and that the treatment group’s scores are not statistically different from those of the control group. Since I only looked at the baseline data and the first year data, I’ll be adding the second year data into my analysis next week and hopefully will find some desired outcomes. Another task that I worked on was transcription of the interviews. During interviews, research assistants asked the participants to imagine if orchestra class is removed from their schedule, and to state if they support the choice or not. Then they are to think of reasons to persuade others to support their choice. The goal for transcribing is to find common themes in the children’s response, and analyze them in a qualitative way. My third task was fun. My doctoral student Jill is going to a conference at Colorado to present the El Sistema study and the other studies that she had worked on. So she practiced her talks with us on Tuesday and today. I enjoyed her talks and also gave feedback to her.
We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
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