Unfortunately, I had to go back to Korea during my fourth week as there was some problem with my visa. After an interview at the US embassy and a few days of waiting, the problem was solved and I returned to the US. While I was missing my time in the lab, Nino finished up the experiment with encapsulation device-transplanted mice and started on an entirely new project. Recently, there has been news on a newborn baby who suffered from cardiac arrest and had little to no chance of survival. After an experimental procedure of transplanting a billion mitochondria into her damaged heart, she showed signs of improvement. We decided to take this approach and apply it to diabetes – if mitochondria had special healing capabilities, then can we transplant them in the pancreas to restore the beta cells? Since both Nino and I were completely new to the field of mitochondria, we started very basic and decided to test if it was actually mitochondria responsible for cell su...
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My mentor's other research assistant, Isabel, and I have begun consistently testing at the Bing nursery school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By now, we've already had the script memorized and have many times had to improvise when the child doesn't follow our script. An example was one incident when Isabel, following our usual protocol, presented the child with a picture of me and asked him if I could come in to watch him play with the toys. The child casually responded, 'No,' and I could see Isabel starting to panic a little since the whole point of our experiment was to have a stranger observe the child play. Isabel questioned the child as to why he did not want me to be inside of the game room, and it turns out the child doesn't want to share his toys with me. As a result, we had to compromise with me observing him from the doorway instead of sitting right next to him. Other than that, testing has been hard because none of the children wants to go to the...
At the start of my fourth week, I was given an independent project to do along with an undergraduate student there, Sarah. Our job would be to perform immunohistochemistry (IHC) on mice brains to delineate regions in the striatum, a region in the brain. IHC utilizes the specificity of antibodies to attach to epitopes on specific antigens. This allows certain cells of a tissue section (with a certain antigen) to be “selected” by a certain antibody. By adding a secondary antibody with a fluorescent tag, target cells can be selectively labeled, imaged, and analyzed. We sought to mark regions in the striatum based on cellular count intensity. The procedure begins with perfusing the mice. This is a gory procedure that involves anaesthetizing a live mouse, pumping out the blood from its circulatory system, injecting a preservative solution into it heart, pumping this solution throughout its circulatory system, chopping its head off, and dissecting out the whole brain. This...
I spent the last two weeks conducting 3 batches of hot-water extractions and testing total organic carbon concentrations on my soil samples. After spending almost two weeks consolidating my protocol, I officially began working on the soil samples from the Luquillo Critical Zone Observatory. Instead of 3 samples that I used in each of my practice trial, I have 12 samples per batch for 4 batches in total, which required much more time and attention. For my first and third batch of hot-water extractions, my data turned out well, and I could see some differences of TOC concentrations between surface and subsurface samples even though I only had half of the complete data. However, the same problem that happened in my practice trials occurred in my second batch—I got some negative numbers, which means that the TOC concentrations of certain samples are lower than that of distilled water. In order to fix this problem, Dr. Plante told me to rerun these samples after I finish all 4 batche...
The past few weeks in the lab were really fun. About 2 weeks ago, the lab welcomed 3 more summer students, which was nice because I wasn’t the newest one around anymore. It was cool to both be learning from my grad students and to be teaching the new student things, even if they were small. I started to truly enjoy coming to work everyday, not only because of the science, but because my lab became a little community and I was a part of it. Lab members weren’t just lab members— they were friends now too. I am really going to miss being here. One issue I faced was not knowing when I would start my project. As time went on, my project kept changing so that it would be something I could complete in my remaining time. I am currently working on determining if there is a difference in the localization of AKT (a protein kinase that has many functions in the cell) if the presence of HBV. To do this, I will be transfecting cells under different conditions, and then counting cells to see whe...