Student Research at Duke

Lulit Price stepped out of the Tom Ortel lab yesterday to shadow two research nurses as they visited patients and gathered data for clinical trials.

So, what exactly do they do? They are the backbone of clinical research- they work in an office setting but also frequent the Duke North Hospital and Duke South clinics to see about potential subjects for current hematological studies. Donned in a white lab coat that I borrowed from Sheree, we headed off to 9th floor, oncology. Their department is primarily concerned with cancers of the blood like lymphomas and leukemia. She and I checked up on the platelet counts of three different patients to see if they were still eligible for PLADO, a nation-wide study that is looking for a more cost-effective way to transfuse platelets. Meanwhile, Robin was working on an observational study on Heparin-Induced Thrombocytopenia that follows cardiac bypass patients. The anticoagulant heparin has the disadvantage of increased clotting in certain patients. Part of her job includes giving these patients the spiel of the study and asking them to sign a consent form to donate their blood. She did this task with reservation, saying that it was difficult approaching people in the ICU who were often in a lot of pain; “I feel like a salesperson”, she told me.

Fei Lian writes (hilariously):

So today in lab I made my first mistake: forgetting to centrifuge the bacteria before suspending them in lysis buffer. Oh no’s. Supposedly, the right way to mini-prep is to first centrifuge the tubes, then dump out the supernatant, then add in lysis buffer, and then resuspend. I just added in lysis…one step ahead of my game.

Well, that took down my samples, so I’m gonna have to redo them all over again. But on a good note, our E coli friends were ready to be French Pressed today. In case you don’t know, a French Press is this high pressure thing that weighs about 20 lbs which squishes the cells until all the organelles and cell membranes explode and pop out. Sweet. And now…they’re in the high-speed (24,000rpm) centrifuge ready to be spun down. And I’m adding elution buffer to clean those tubes.

Lab is fun, seriously.

Before Rebecca Liu can study kinesins, these amazing little walking molecules that drag things around the cell, she has to learn a ton of stuff about them. Her mentor, Sharyn A. Endow in cell biology, has been assigning readings to get Rebecca up to speed and then they discuss what she’s learned. The Endow lab studies the machinery of the cell that moves things around, such as pulling the chromosomes back before the cell splits.

The motor molecule Kinesin makes an appearance just before the half-way point of this fantastic movie done by Harvard with support from our friends at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. (See the film) Kinesin is the weird barbell thing walking along a beam towards you, towing a huge load. Isn’t it cool?

It takes some imagination to see the strange, rubbery world of the cell at this scale (and the music’s usually not included) but that’s what Rebecca and the Endow lab are trying to do!

Even though they’re on the lowest rung of the laboratory ladder, and are often stuck with the most mundane, menial jobs, we’re seeing words like “thrilled” and “lovvvvvvve” in the students’ posts this week.

Monica Hamilton is handling mice, quite literally, in Anne West’s lab:

This first week has been dedicated to simply handling the mice so that when we pick them up and place them in a maze, they don’t go berzerk from the anxiety of being touched by those darn nitrile gloves. You might imagine that the mice are cute. Well, they are at first, but after the hundredth time that your hands are used as a bathroom, the cuteness starts to wear off.

Priya Khatri inadvertently damaged some of the merchandise in Nina Sherwood’s fruitfly lab:

Every lab has some sort of routine maintenance thing that is not fun, but just has to be done. For our lab, it is transferring those hundreds of vials of Drosophila into other hundreds of vials of fresh food. In my first week, I might have transferred about 500 vials (not bragging or anything). It took some time to get used to; especially since the first one was a fiasco. Have you ever seen a picture of a cute kid releasing a jar of butterflies, with a serene expression of his face? (My) still frame of my first vial would be me staring in terror at the fruit flies escaping to freedom (some bumping in my face, some meeting the wrath of my deadly hands).

…sort of like blogging !

Oh, to be a CSI lab tech on TV! - perfect technique going in, clean data coming out — in seconds no less. Alas, that’s television; this is science. Several of our lab newbies took their first wobbly steps at lab technique this week and learned that no, it doesn’t always work the first time.

Jackie Sink’s first posting is simply titled “An Ode to Failure” and details her experiences with electrophoresis in Sally York’s lab.

I remember my first experience with electrophoresis being less-than-successful. First try: Didn’t put the correct amount of loading buffer into the wells, so the results were skewed. Second try: Didn’t plug in the machine! Waited a half hour, then was completely flabergasted to find that the DNA had not moved at all. Third try: successful! Let’s just say that success is so much sweeter following failure.

With a bare desk, a bright smile, and a fresh pair of gloves, Julie Sogani is well on her way to curing cancer in Gerard Blobe’s lab. (And look at what a nice bunch of folks they are!) She’s investigating a part of the signalling pathway that seems to spur cancer cells to grow. “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!)”

You know, it’s probably a really good thing Jason Chen called his PI Sri Raghavachari a genius in an earlier posting.

One of the major adjustments faced by several of the bloggers in this bewildering first week is the experience of working with laboratory models — animals, that is. Biomedical science and all of the health care improvements it has created, simply would not be possible without these valuable model organisms like mice, fish, nematodes and monkeys. While the lab workers and grad students who have been working with these animals for years tend to have steady hands and nerves, the same cannot be said for the first-timers!

Jessica Shuen is handling mice in her lab, and admits to screaming a bit at one point this week.

Sarah Steele is a cowpoke who rustles 1-mm livestock called C. elegans (that lil’ feller pictured above) from pen to pen as part of a study on the immune system in Dr. Alejandro Aballay’s lab.

When she’s not taking scads of digital photos and posting them to her blog, Trisha Saha is going to be working with embryonic fish, mice and chicks to study birth defects of the heart in Dr. Margaret Kirby’s lab. (Incidentally, Dr. Kirby is quite the photographer herself!)

Vanessa Kennedy is showing flashing lights to rhesus macaques to learn more about neuroanatomy in Dr. Jennifer Groh’s lab.

Samantha Pearlman has her eyes peeled for the authentic scientist — not the goofy Christopher Lloyd character — but a real scientist. She hopes to figure them out this summer, and will tell us in her blog:

There are a lot of misconceptions about science and about people who devote their lives to science. While I’ve always loved the crazy mad scientist character with the ubiquitous white lab coat, I’m not so sure which stereotypes are actually true and which are fictional (Do researchers have social lives or are they confined to lab-intramural softball leagues? Does anyone actually use that dingy shower in the women’s restroom on the third floor of BioSci?), but I’m planning to find out this summer. And, hopefully, this blog will be a way for the outside world to see what really happens in a lab.

So, stay tuned for riveting updates from the lab. I’ll let you know when I find my first mad scientist.

We can’t wait to find out what you’ve learned, Samantha!

Jason Chen is off to the races with two posts already! Go Jason! He’s doing mathematical modeling of the intricate dance of molecules at the receiving end of a neuron. How do neurotransmitters land on the hairy dendrite end of a neuron, and what do all the possible ways they interact with this nerve cell have to say? (And how does he even know who MC Hammer is?) Check him out

We’ve asked nearly 40 undergraduates to share their first experiences in a research lab as they participate in the Howard Hughes Fellows summer research program at Duke. Watch this space for the “greatest hits” from among the blogs.