My STEP experience in undergraduate research this summer was a great experience for me. It taught me a lot of things not just about lab techniques but about the direction I want to take my life. One of my goals this summer was to find out if I wanted to go to grad school and become a researcher or if I wanted to do something else. I found out that while I like doing research, I don't think I want to do it as a career. I don't like the fact that I don't get a lot of personal interaction with other people outside of my lab. I think I would prefer becoming a doctor or something like that where I have a lot of personal interactions.
As for my research, hopefully our paper will get published sometime soon. In addition, we are going to try to identify the protein that sits on DNA at the promoter region. We're not sure how difficult this is going to be but we're going to give it a shot. If we can do it and characterize the protein, it'll be a major paper that would likely get published in a major journal, which would be a big deal for my professional career, even if I don't go into the research field. But that's a long way down the road from now.
Overall, my experience has been a great one. I would like to thank STEP for giving me the opportunity to work full time this summer in a research lab so that I could learn all of the things that I did. It was a summer where I learned a lot about myself and what I want to do with my life, which is a great thing for a third year undergrad. Hopefully, I'll continue to learn many things in the lab and about myself so that I can accomplish all of my academic and personal goals.
Thanks for reading!
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Final Results!
This time I did the two repeats at once. It's more work in the short term but I'll be done faster this way. It's not that much work with the cells but the cell lysing and sonication take a lot longer. I staggered that a couple of days apart so it wasn't that bad.
Both repeats showed the results I'm looking for though. It's not great but I think it should be good enough to go with. Again, the new siRNA didn't show the effect as well as the old one did but I think we proved that the result wasn't just a fluke with the old siRNA, which was my whole purpose.
We're ready to move toward publication now. Most of the paper is already written but we'll have to add a little section about my results and a figure displaying my results. It shouldn't take too long for the paper to be submitted for review. Once it goes out, it'll be reviewed by a few people in the scientific community. They'll make a few revisions and suggest some experiments that we need to do for the paper to be approved and published. Hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle and it'll go to publication quickly. We should get the reviewers comments sometime in December or early January. We hope that it'll get published in the spring some time.
I'll do a summary of my STEP experience in undergraduate research in the next few days. That'll most likely be my last post so it'll be a good one.
Both repeats showed the results I'm looking for though. It's not great but I think it should be good enough to go with. Again, the new siRNA didn't show the effect as well as the old one did but I think we proved that the result wasn't just a fluke with the old siRNA, which was my whole purpose.
We're ready to move toward publication now. Most of the paper is already written but we'll have to add a little section about my results and a figure displaying my results. It shouldn't take too long for the paper to be submitted for review. Once it goes out, it'll be reviewed by a few people in the scientific community. They'll make a few revisions and suggest some experiments that we need to do for the paper to be approved and published. Hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle and it'll go to publication quickly. We should get the reviewers comments sometime in December or early January. We hope that it'll get published in the spring some time.
I'll do a summary of my STEP experience in undergraduate research in the next few days. That'll most likely be my last post so it'll be a good one.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Result!
Finally I got something useable. Both siRNAs finally showed the result we were expecting. The new one I am testing didn't work as well as the old one but it doesn't really need to. We just need to show that the new one works okay and that the result we got with the old one wasn't some kind of fluke.
So this is really good news. Hopefully I'm almost finished with this project. I don't like how long it takes me to get one piece of data. But hopefully I only have to do two more repeats and then I'll be done. We have to do repeats to ensure that we get data that is statistically significant. There's a complex statistical test that we use that I won't go into but basically the more repeats we get, the more likely that the results will be significant and accepted by the scientific community.
So this is really good news. Hopefully I'm almost finished with this project. I don't like how long it takes me to get one piece of data. But hopefully I only have to do two more repeats and then I'll be done. We have to do repeats to ensure that we get data that is statistically significant. There's a complex statistical test that we use that I won't go into but basically the more repeats we get, the more likely that the results will be significant and accepted by the scientific community.
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