Last week was when we started the analysis of our data. At the end of the week, Nick said to me "it's one thing to collect all the data, but then it's another thing to actually ask 'what does this mean'?" which pretty much sums up my entire week. At the beginning of the week I met with Nick and Dr Lewis a couple times to see how we wanted to classify some of the questions and each time we met, he changed how he wanted us to organize the data. For example, there were a couple questions on the forms like "hobbies" or "AP classes" and if someone wrote down something that didn't fall into one of the pre-established categories, I had to put them into an "other" category. The other category ended up being too large so I spent most of the week re-sorting through all of the raw data to come up with a way to classify the data that we put in the "other" category. As I said in probably all my previous posts, it's kind of hard to explain in just a few words but the gist of it is that I spent most of the week organizing and re-organizing data because every time I met with Dr Lewis he decided we needed to change it a little bit- but I'm not complaining because it gave me a real experience of what research really entails. Later on in the week, Nick showed me how he was doing the cross analysis of the data against different criteria, and although I wasn't able to do it and I didn't know how, I really appreciated him showing me and explaining every part of it to me. This coming week is my last and although I don't think we'll have conclusive results yet, I'm planning to keep in touch with Dr Lewis so that I can keep up to date on the project.
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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