Student Research at Duke

Welcome to my blog! As apart of the Howard Hughes Research Fellows Program I will be blogging about my summer experience and hope to share with you what I am learning. Dr. Blobe’s lab focuses on the transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-B) signal transduction pathway and and its dichotomous role in both promoting and inhibiting tumorigenesis. I will be working with Jack (a Duke surgery resident currently doing research) to find if a particular protein-let’s call it “protein X” for our purposes- interacts with the TGF-B receptor, Alk-1, and then characterize its effect on receptor signaling.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          I have just finished my first week at the lab. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I observed Jack as he taught me how to do a cell culture and transfection. On Thursday and Friday he had to attend a conference. As a resident, he is a likely target for pharmaceutical companies so his entire trip-transportation, hotel, and meals-has been provided for by a company. I guess that’s one of the perks of the medical profession   So instead on Thursday I watched Liz (a fifth year graduate student) perform the final step-”detection”- of a Western Blot, i.e. incubation with a primary and secondary antibody and developing pictures of the gel. Unfortunately the results weren’t as good as Liz hoped. If I had worked nearly five days preparing and conducting such an experiment only to get so-so results I would expect to surely feel disappointed. Yet Liz didn’t appear to be too disappointed. As I have learned in the lab this past week, one shouldn’t expect to get great results his or her very first try (or even the third or fourth tries!) It takes time (and much tweaking) to get results that can even considered for publication. And though I was only in the lab for 2 hours today, I definitely had the most fun experience today. Because Jack is away, he bestowed on me the responsibility to take care of his cells so I got to do my very first cell culture!                                         Here’s  some pictures of the Blobe lab:                                               Jack at his bench pipetting for a transfection.                                       Liz and Ryan deep in conversation on the project they’re working on.                                And me at my very own desk with lots of reading to do.Thanks for reading my blog. Talk to you soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.