I just got out of my exit interview with Amelia, and everybody seems to be leaving the lab around this week. No matter how hard my fingers were crossed, I never ended up getting any conclusive results, but I'm glad I was able to contribute to the project. This whole experience has been really eye-opening and has let me see the world of research from a different perspective than just Google Scholar and Pubmed. Amelia invited me to be at the lab next summer as well, so maybe I'll be able to find some results then (and get my ID???). I've met some really great people at the lab who showed great patience with me and have given me advice on colleges and life in general, and I hope to keep in touch with them. I'd like to thank Dr. Peretz and Mr. Sham for preparing me for this experience and checking in as it went through as well as my mom who helped me throughout my eight weeks here.
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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