Week 4:
University of Iowa Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology

June 28, 2013

I am pleased to say that this week went better than the previous week! For my experiment, I am pretty much repeating what I have done in the past. I am making cDNA from RNA that I’ve isolated from previous trials with the NFN and/or PTU. I’ve held back on making this earlier because I wanted to make sure that I could obtain significant data using qPCR first. Our most recent trial is by far our largest yet. It includes not only wildtype fish but mutant zebrafish called touchtone (tct) resulting in 24 test tubes that contain approximately 360 zebrafish embryos. Due to the large number of test tubes, the insitu that will perform on the embryos will be a challenge. I think that this will be a test at how well I can perform this procedure, so I’m excited tackle this challenge!

This week I also learned about collaboration. My PI, Barbara, and I met with another PI of a different lab to discuss about working together. Someone in his lab will be working with cell lines to gather more data for the project that I’m working on. I think that this is a valuable experience for me because not only have I learned how to work with other people in my lab but with other people from different labs as well.

For the FUTURE program, I had to have my picture taken with Barbara and my PI for their yearbook. It was interesting because I haven’t taken candid pictures before only posed ones. I have to say it was a little awkward, but I’m excited to see how they turned out!

I’ve been reflecting this past week on how attending Cornell has prepared me for my research position. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that I am able to really focus on projects especially more long-term projects. For example, my lab in Cell and Molecular Biology was the same project for the entire block. This has helped me gain the ability to not focus on a project for several weeks but also keep the main goal of the project in mind. As I’m mentioned in a previous post, I’ve had to read a lot of scientific literature. For Cell and Molecular Biology, I had to select two scientific papers and provide a summary over them. By gaining exposure to this type of material, I know what I have to look for and what I need to do to ensure that I understand the content. I hope that as I practice this will only get easier for me.