First Week
This past week has been exciting, intense, and extremely educational. My mentor worked closely with me the past few days to teach me various protocols that will be useful when I begin conducting independent experiments in the next few weeks. After discussing some basic questions to be answered during the course of my fellowship, my mentor taught me basic techniques involved in cell culture. Because the cells grow rapidly, the cultures must be passaged often so that they do not reach complete confluence on the culture dish as this would inhibit further division of the cell line. It was very exciting to be able to see actual cancer cells under the microscope and subsequently work with them. I also conducted two brief experiments involving TGFB signaling to better understand the signaling pathway and further practice basic scientific techniques. I analyzed the results of my experiment by conducting polyacrylomide gel electrophoresis to separate the Smad proteins that had been activated by TGFB and used immunoblotting, or Western blotting, to detect the proteins.
