Student Research at Duke

So last week was definitely the busiest week of the program. On Wednesday, I presented during our weekly lab meeting, wrote an abstract, and created a poster. I never used Powerpoint as much as I did in that short stretch of time and thanks to that I am a wiz at it! The lab meeting was probably the hardest task to complete, just because I was presenting for other lab members who were familiar with my topic unlike during the chalk talks and had much more to cover pertaining to methods and data. But it really helped to make sure I understood everything beforehand and be able to convey it myself to others. On to our experiments…on Friday after running our Western blot for the third time, we finally got very promising data (essentially we found a very specific domain on ”protein X” that is required for interaction with ALK-1). It’s so exciting to finally get successful data! Since that data will be on my poster, I will post my previous (slightly unsuccessful) western blots from my lab presentation, just to show what I’ve been working on for the past three weeks.                           

On Wednesday, the program hosted a career panel of graduate students, post-docs and MD/Phds. Before I came to Duke, I always thought I wanted to be a physician. But after trying new classes and spending the summer doing research, I have become more open-minded about all the other wonderful career choices. Pursuing medical research that can be applied to treating/preventing human diseases would fulfill both my aspiration to do hands-on science and help people. I have always found science to tackle intriguing questions that make me want to learn more and that’s what led me to apply to the HHMI research program in the first place. Though I have found research to be a slow process, the idea that I could discover something new and make a contribution to the scientific community makes research all the more worth it. If I continue to be ambitious I might try to get both a Phd and MD like my P.I. To keep up with the clinical aspect, once a week he works in a clinic with pancreatic cancer patients so that he gets to work in the best of both worlds. One postdoc recommended we try working in the biology industry as with the boom in technology it is constantly expanding. In high school, a parent who is an MD and works in a pharmaceutical firm visited to tell us about her career. I found it fascinating that she got to use her understanding of the human body to help create new drugs and test them in clincal trials. What ever career I decide to pursue, I’m sure with the ever expanding field of biology and research, science will be intertwined in it.

So because Wednesday was July 4th, this week has been slower than usual but nonetheless much was accomplished. First, on Friday Jack and I presented an article about TGF-B signalling in prostate cancer stromal cells for our lab’s biweekly journal club meeting. It was interesting to learn about what approaches other labs are doing to study TGF-B. We did another Western blot to detect if our ”protein X” fragments were successfully expressed. However, since we still didn’t detect any signal for the fragments of interest, we immunoprecipitated the fragments with an antibody before doing the Western to reduce any nonspontaneous proteins binding to the membrane. As far as the mutagenesis experiment is going, we have transformed and minipreped the truncation mutants (1-193, 1-200) and the point mutant (V175A) and sent those for sequencing. On Friday, we found out that luckily one of samples of ”protein X” 140-215 had the correct sequence so we will be able to maxiprep the bacteria and be ready to use it for future experiments.