Student Research at Duke

Sarah Steele has been so busy cleaning up messy explosions in her lab that she missed some of the ethics seminars last week. But at least she’s got pictures!

One would never mistake a fruitfly for a human, yet there are some remarkable biological similarities that make these insects very useful for biomedical research. Priya Khatri saw that first-hand this week when her PI, Nina Sherwood, showed her some movies of humans and fruitflies with a similar neuro-muscular disorder. Priya writes: “First she showed me a video of HSP patients and then the fly video. It was as if a field of lightbulbs had alighted, as well as thousands of questions.”

Reading these posts, sometimes it’s a little hard to believe that these are students who have had only one year of undergraduate education. Yishan Cheng describes her work on the Wnt signalling pathway in cancer stem cells about as well as anyone could in lay language.

Kristin Knouse is having some fun tweaking a signalling pathway called transforming growth factor beta (or TGFb) and seeing — actually seeing — what it does to cells. There’s a chance this pathway has something to do with cancer cells being able to spread via metastasis, so this is pretty cool stuff, in addition to making pretty pictures. I’ll let her explain it further.

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.

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