Student Research at Duke

Well, I don’t really have much to say about responsible conduct in research, but I do think it is necessary. I think the movie and Dr. Mclay’s talk were really interesting. The movie was cool because I never really knew the history surrounding AIDS, besides that it supposedly came from monkeys somehow. It was really informative to watch a movie that showed what actually took place. In terms of responsibility, it was interesting to see how publishing new information plays a large role when it comes to deciding to collaborate on a project to help people in need (those with AIDS), and trying to take full credit for something just so you can become a more (less?) respected researcher.
As for Dr. Mclay’s talk, I thought he was really weird in a funny way. It seemed like his powerpoint presentation was filled with riddles, but that’s good because it really made me think. Overall I found his talk informative because he mentioned that being careless is one of the easiest ways to mess up results, something I think everything should be careful about especially when going to lab tired or just bored from doing something repetitive. In that situation I think it’s necessary to realize that the experiments ARE important and that if it means going to lab later in the day and staying late then its a good thing because you’re less likely to be careless with your procedures.
Well, that’s all for now…

Last week was good in lab, my mentor Josh has kept me really busy. Early on in the week I had to figure out how to make DNA primers to be used to mutate a gene that codes for an enzyme. It was cool ordering the primers and receiving the exact sequence that I helped design a few days later by fedex. I posted a few pics of the primers below. I find that it’s hard to fully grasp the ideas of everything I’m assigned to do, but its really good because I believe that first hand experience is one of the best ways to learn, especially when it has to do with lab procedures and why you use specific buffers and lysing agents and not others. I was in lab yesterday (Saturday) extracting DNA from bacteria and began a PCR reaction using the primers that arrived a few days earlier. Tomorrow I have to process the results of the PCR reaction, make a solution so I can run gels of the products of the PCR reaction to make sure the primers worked, make a couple other DNA primers, and try to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing in lab. Should be fun, a little exhausting, but its cool.

Ordering primers:

Primers arrived:

So I’m in Dr. York’s Pharmacology lab. His lab is interesting because he actually incorporates various different fields into his research. Members of the lab focus on lithium effects from a pharmacological, crystallographic, and biochemistry perspective. I’m personally going to be focusing on the biochemistry side of things. On one of the first days this past week I did a quick DNA extraction prep, which there should be a picture of below, then the rest of the week I began planning how I’m going to be designing the sulfutransferase assay I mention in my profile on the side of the page. So far I’ve designed DNA primers which are going to be used to make insect cells produce the enzyme I’m going to be testing. Tommorrow I’m probably going to order the primers so I can incorporate them into vectors to be injected into cells maybe this upcoming week or the next. I’ll keep things updated on here of course. Here’s a couple pics from lab:

DNA Prep

DNA Samples

Since this is my first post, I’ll say a little about myself. I was born in San Francisco and have spent pretty much my whole life in California. After High School I went to community college for a couple of years. I originally planned on transferring to a four year university in two years but decided to stay there a “little” longer. A year ago I finally transferred to UC Berkeley and I’ve been there ever since. A little while back a professor friend nominated me to join the HHMI EXROP summer program. As part of the program I was given the choice to do summer research at the school of my liking. I chose Duke because the research sounded really interesting and I had always wanted to visit the South. As a condition of coming to Duke I had to also participate in the HHMI Summer Research Fellows program, so that’s why I’m here. I’ll share some info about my lab in my next post since right now I have to go.