Raga Bhagavathi, Week 6

This week I finished my data collection! Getting 50 subjects seemed easy-ish at first but it actually turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. I finished Wednesday night and Thursday was one of the busiest days I’ve had so far. Dr. Peretz visited me and took me out to lunch (!!!) and then I got to show her around my lab and introduce her to Nick (the postdoc) and Dr. Lewis (even though we had to interrupt his meeting to say hi). Then I got to meet with Dr. Lewis and Nick and we discussed what the next steps of data analysis would be. We ended up talking for over an hour which was great because they both helped me a lot and genuinely wanted me to understand what I was doing. We worked together to categorize the questions in the surveys into “social behaviors” and “non-social behaviors” and then we discussed how to give each individual a score for how “social” they are. Kinda hard to explain without showing it but basically as I sort of explained in an earlier blog post each answer choice corresponds to a number 1-4 so after I enter all the data and add up the numbers, the lower the score, the more “social” an individual seems to be. After this, we discussed how I need to go through all the data again and expand on some of the questions so that’s what I’ll be doing for the next few days at least. After we get all of that sorted, we’ll be able to more easily look at the data and what it all means. Dr. Lewis is really understanding of the fact that I have to do a whole presentation about this in the fall so he said after I leave, they’ll continue the work and I can meet with him in the fall to get all the data together for a presentation.

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Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been awaiting ligament, menisci, and cartilage tissue from a canine or human knee joint for (interleukin) IL-1B tissue culture. IL-1B is an inflammatory cytokine that has been proven to increase rates of tissue degeneration and osteoarthritis development in the Thompson Lab. Dr. Stoker wants me to experiment with different types of knee tissues in a co-culture with varying levels of this cytokine to determine its effects on the entire knee joint. This co-culture uses an insert permeable to the media to separate the two tissue samples from physical contact, while allowing them to share the same media. This creates an extremely accurate model for knee tissues in their native environment due to their exposure to the same synovial fluid in the joint. This model would then be treated with the IL-1B and cultured for 21 days. During these 21 days, the media would be collected every three days for biomarker evaluation at the end of the stu...

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

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...

Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...

Peddie EXP Summer 2018

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