Student Research at Duke

…But maybe Samantha Pearlman is about to identify a new species! After isolating DNA from her mail-order Madagascar tomato frogs and making the samples jump through various procedural hoops, Samantha has decent data on 12 of 36 frogs. (As for the rest, well, she’s got to go through it all over again…)

Nonetheless, things are getting pretty cool in the Yoder Lab: “When we compared the frogs to each other, we found an enormous amount of genetic variation– and after comparing the eastern frogs to the western frogs, we found that there was more variation WITHIN our single eastern species than there was between the previous paper’s TWO separate western species.”

Could it be that the putative single eastern species is not singular? Stay tuned!

Andrew Lyu wrote:

After almost 4 weeks in lab, I’ve found that I’ve moved away from the “What am I supposed to do today?” attitude towards more of a “What CAN I do today?” mood. It’s incredible how quickly you can get addicted to research. I find myself dreaming about protocols, coming in on the weekends (by my own free will ), staying until 7 or 8pm, and just getting completely wrapped up in what I’m doing. It’s truly been a great experience, and I definitely would like to continue researching throughout my undergraduate career.

And then the Brigid Hogan (corrected 7/16) Fan Wang lab got a paper accepted to Neuron and he saw that part of the operation too!

Sometimes, doing good science means making your own tools. Usually that’s when you’re planning to do something that nobody has thought of before. But in Sidney Kuo’s case, it was just that he couldn’t find an appropriate vacuum filtering setup.

“I had to empty and clean the only vacuum filtration flask we had, which contained probably the nastiest, worst smelling compounds in this entire lab, file a hole through a rubber stopper large enough for the funnel, which took at least an hour, and cut my own filter paper to fit the funnel.”

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.”

Last week’s seminars on research ethics inspired several thoughtful posts from program fellows. Through a reading, a movie and a lecture, they were introduced to the ugly underbellies of data fraud, squabbles over credit, and the risks faced by a whistleblower. A few good ones:
Wendy Liu - Julie Sogani - Priyanka Amin - Lulit Price

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.

Catherine Hartman has posted some pictures of the fly lab and told us about trashing half of her DNA samples by mistake. D’Oh!

It was welcome news to Julie Stevenson that her mentor was never really interested in Medical School or becoming a doctor. Julie isn’t either, but sometimes she feels like the odd woman out for just wanting to pursue a PhD. “I was fascinated and sort of relieved,” she says.